DNA and the Book of Mormon w/ LDS Discussions – 05

Introduction and Series Overview

John Dehlin 0:01 Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. We are so excited to be continuing our series with Mike from the amazing LDS Discussions) website. Today we are going to be talking about Book of Mormon and DNA again with Mike from LDS Discussions). And, you know, we've already done, I think, four episodes so far. We've, we've done treasure digging, we've done the gold plates, we've done Book of Mormon translation, and we have done, what was it, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 0:41 116 pages.

John Dehlin 0:41 116 pages. Yeah. And now we're doing. We're jumping to DNA and we're super excited to have with us for this episode, Gerardo. Hey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano 0:51 Hey, John.

John Dehlin 0:51 So glad to have you. Yeah, thanks for coming. Yeah, thanks for taking time off your busy work schedule to join us.

Gerardo Sumano 0:57 Yeah. Super excited about this one.

John Dehlin 0:59 Yeah. And. And then, of course, we have. We have with us Mike. Hey, Mike.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:06 What's up, everybody?

John Dehlin 1:08 Yeah. How are you enjoying these episodes so far?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:10 They're fun. It's, you know, it's funny to go over them again later on. I've forgotten a lot. I did most of these like a year ago, so it's kind of been interesting to read them again and then to go through them. And hopefully, like I said, we're just hoping people are finding. Finding some use out of them.

John Dehlin 1:23 I'm sure my. Our listeners and viewers join us in, in being amazed at the command of detail and the conceptual command you have of all these topics, because it's a lot to keep in one brain and you do an amazing job.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:42 I don't know about that. But, you know, like I said, one of the things I mentioned in one of our previous episodes, it's just, you know, anyone can do it. You know, I'm not like some, you know, scholar that has three degrees in history. And so there are people that can run circles around me all day long. And, and I think the fact that I can at least get to this point just shows that when you really do dig into this stuff, you can really draw some conclusions that are evidence based. And like I mentioned many times, you put the pieces of the puzzle back together and you can do it in a way where you don't have to stretch. You can have command of the issues because as long as you take the evidence at face value, you can make it work together in a seamless way without having to jam it together.

John Dehlin 2:22 Yeah, well. Well, again, LDS discussions.com is the website. There's amazing detail there. But our job here is to Try and synthesize each of these essays. So there's an essay on Book of Mormon and DNA, which is one of like 50 or 60 essays that you have on your website. So we're going to be covering that essay. We'll include a link to it in the show notes. But let's go ahead and dive in.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:48 Yeah, let's do it.

Setting Up the DNA and Book of Mormon Problem

John Dehlin 2:49 All right, so we begin. How do you want to kind of set up the situation with DNA?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:56 It's a little trickier because we don't have as much to talk about before. Most of this is going to be about apologetics. But just for me personally, when I was a convert, I was told that the Book of Mormon was basically the origin story of the Native Americans. And it gave the story in the history of the Native Americans before the European settlers arrived. And we finally knew that Jesus had visited this continent.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 3:18 It didn't leave it by itself. And so, basically, what was crazy for me was when I started to finally do the deep dive into this was to learn that the DNA testing that came out really without any question, tells us that the narrative from the Book of Mormon that these are the Native Americans came from Jerusalem is simply not the case. And this is exemplified in no better way than to say that the introduction to the Book of Mormon was changed from saying that the Native Americans were the principal ancestors of the American Indians, as I was taught to, to saying they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.

John Dehlin 3:55 Yeah. And this is a really important thing to summarize that for almost 200 years, everyone knew Joseph Smith, knew Brigham Young, knew all the missionaries to Ohio and to the frontiers, knew all prophets, seers, and revelators between Joseph Smith and, let's just say, I don't know, Spencer B. Kimball. Everyone knew who the Lamanites were. The Lamanites were Native Americans, North, Central and South America, along with Pacific Islanders, Alaskans. Gerardo, anything else you want to add to that?

Gerardo Sumano 4:32 No, that's what I was taught. That is why I taught on my mission. Yeah.

John Dehlin 4:36 Growing up in Mexico, did you have any doubts about who the Lamanites were?

Gerardo Sumano 4:39 No doubt that I was a Lamanite.

John Dehlin 4:41 You were a Lamanite?

Gerardo Sumano 4:42 Yeah.

John Dehlin 4:42 That makes it very personal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah. And then for. For, like, gen zers or even millennials or Mormons who are unaware, this is just a. It was a groundbreaking thing. Do you remember the year around. The year that they changed the Book of Mormon title page? Gerardo? Or. Or Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 5:02 Do you guys remember around 2010, I think, 2006.

John Dehlin 5:06 2006. So my. My memory is. This is just my memory, and I'll just give a little bit of background. I'm working at M. It's. It's, you know, 1999, 2000, 2001. I don't remember the exact date. May have been a couple years later. But before 2004, I remember reading an article that there was this.

John Dehlin 5:27 This professor named Thomas Murphy that had. That had studied that, you know, DNA genetics had come out. They'd started studying, you know, DNA. They sequence the genome or whatever. They were able to look at DNA with a new level of scrutiny that they had never done before. And then, you know, immediately, you know, Thomas Murphy, a scholar, starts looking into and applying DNA science to Native Americans. Because wouldn't it be amazing to be able to show that. That all the Native Americans tie directly back to Israelites somehow, some way? And immediately Thomas Murphy was called into a disciplinary council and threatened with excommunication. And it was only because he threatened. You know, he kind of threatened.

Gerardo Sumano 6:19 He.

John Dehlin 6:19 He threatened to call the newspapers and have the media show up at his disciplinary council that the church called off his disciplinary council. But this is all happening before the church changes its title page. And then Simon Southerton comes out with his book Losing a Lost Tribe. And. And all of a sudden, it becomes sort of irrefutable that Native Americans, their DNA doesn't tie to, you know, Israel or the Middle east, but instead it ties to Asia. And all of a sudden, mid 2000s, early 2000s, the church has a huge problem.

Gerardo Sumano 6:56 Yeah.

John Dehlin 6:57 Gerardo, did you want to add something to that?

Gerardo Sumano 6:58 I was just gonna. I. I didn't remember. Like, it's just crazy because I went on my mission in 2013, and we were still teaching and learning by memory. The introduction of the Book of Mormon that said that it was the principal ancestors of the American Indians, the Lamanites, were. So even though it changed 2006, I don't know if the prints hadn't. There were still so many old ones that have been printed. So I didn't know up until 2013, my whole mission was teaching where. Teaching in Mexico City. That. That all Mexicans were parts of the Lamanites. Yeah.

John Dehlin 7:35 And again, it's a technique the church uses when they have a big change that kind of overwrites something really big about the past. Like, let's say they want to get rid of Mormon doctrine, you know, and stop publishing it and selling it, or they want to get rid of Miracle of Forgiveness, or they want to change something about the narrative. They Never just come out and tell everybody, look, we just found out all this DNA evidence. The Book of Mormon title page says this. Now we're going to change. Now we're going to change it because of that. They don't do that. They just quietly make the change. Most people don't even know for decades. Most members will still believe the old way.

Gerardo Sumano 8:14 Yeah.

John Dehlin 8:15 But then over time the narrative switches and nobody is the wiser.

Gerardo Sumano 8:20 Right.

John Dehlin 8:20 And that's what they did in this case.

Gerardo Sumano 8:21 Yeah.

John Dehlin 8:22 Yeah. And I hope, Mike, I hope you don't mind that history, but the truth is we all understand that history because we lived it, but non Mormons and then a bunch of newer people, newer to the faith crisis stuff will. Will have unbelievably, inexplicably, never heard any of this. Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 8:39 Yeah. And like I said, when I converted, I took the discussions in the mid-90s, I converted late-90s. And this was just, it wasn't even a point of any ambiguity. It was, this is the history of the Native Americans. And these are. Every Native American comes from this. Because there was no one here before it. So I mean it was not. There was no we'll get to the apologetics. But none of that really existed when I took the discussions. And so.

John Dehlin 9:04 But this should have been a major explosion, this change, because the Book of Mormon title page, I'm sure you're going to talk about this. It's what is. It wasn't. Didn't Joseph Smith write it? No. Who wrote.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 9:15 So this introduction was added, I believe, in 1981.

John Dehlin 9:18 Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 9:19 And so this is not considered to be off the plates.

John Dehlin 9:22 Okay. But it is a big deal, right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 9:24 It's a big deal just because it really highlights what the. Where they, where the church was as far as the beliefs and the truth claims.

John Dehlin 9:29 Yeah, yeah. Because. Yeah. That's what all prophets is and revelators from Joseph to basically spend something. Okay, so back to your story. So the church quietly changes.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 9:41 Yes.

John Dehlin 9:42 Around what year?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 9:43 2006, if we go to the next slide, just kind of goes over this with more text. So basically it just shows the DNA studies were so conclusive that it forced the Church to make this one word change. And so they created the introduction in 1981. I believe it was Bruce R. McConkey who did it, but I'm not positive. And it just says they're the principal ancestors of the American Indians. And then after 2006, they had to change it to our among. And the thing is, you think, well, it's just changing one word, but that One word change changes the entire historicity, the entire narrative of the Book of Mormon, with just a single word in the introduction.

John Dehlin 10:18 Yeah, it's a big deal.

Gerardo Sumano 10:19 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 10:20 And so when we go to the next slide, we're basically setting up just the problem that the DNA poses for the Book of Mormon, that most of this episode is going to be in the apologetics itself. And so we're going to work off the Gospel topics essay for a lot of it, just because that is what we would consider to be the Church's best response to it. And in the essay, they say some have contended that the migrations mentioned in the Book of Mormon did not occur because the majority of DNA identified to date in modern native peoples most closely resembles that of Eastern Asian populations.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 10:53 And what I want to say is when the Church says some, they mean everybody outside of the Church, because this directly contradicts what Spencer W. Kimball said, who you just mentioned. He said they are not Orientals. They are from the Near East. I think they are not from the Near East. I think it is not impossible that there could have seeped across the Bering Strait. A little Oriental blood is claimed by some people. But basically these Lamanites, including the Indian, are the descendants of Lehi who left Jerusalem 600 years BC. So Spencer W. Kimball is saying without any question that the Book of Mormon, the Native Americans are not Orientals.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 11:29 They are not from, you know, the East Asia. And so when the essay makes it sound like, well, you know, some people have said that. No, I mean, everyone in the church said that they were from Jerusalem, and everyone outside the church post DNA is saying the opposite. So that is a clash again, where the Church backed down, at least within the introduction page. And it's not something that you can just brush away now because now you have, what, 180 years at that point of quotes to work from, from church leaders and prophets and seers and revelators. You can't just throw them off as, you know, the opinions of men.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 12:02 It's too seeped into the revelations as well. Like, this is a problem that is going to. We're going to see as we go through this presentation. You cannot. You just can't shake off.

Gerardo Sumano 12:10 Yeah, I think it's interesting that they're saying because the majority of DNA identified to date is modern native people closely resembles the Asians. It's not. The majority is literally all right, like

Mike (LDS Discussions) 12:25 there like 99.6% or something like that. It's pretty much all of it. And then Simon Southerton was on, and he Gave up what the rest of it was. He kind of went through what the remaining percentage was. And the, the point is everyone in the world has some similar DNA. And so what he's saying is you could still see where they're coming. Like, you could see the, the direction of, of the, the population genetics. But, yeah, what's not there is not proving the Book of Mormon. It's just stuff that's similar between people.

John Dehlin 12:51 Yeah, yeah. And so, like, if we're just going very simple, simple analysis, it should be a major smoking gun. Number one, that the DNA tells us that Native Americans are from Asia and that this contradicts almost 200 years of prophet seers and revelators, just without having any more in the podcast. We could end the podcast now with them changing the title page of the Book of Mormon and say, wow, game over. Book of Mormon is dead. Right? You could do that. You could do that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 13:24 We talk all the time about, like, smoking. Like, I always think of it. Like, I read a lot in the overview. It's like, do you look for smoking guns or do you look for death by a thousand cuts? Because you could go either way. And this one, I would actually. I mean, I fully agree. It's a smoking gun. And that's why we're, like, on slide 3 or 4. The rest of the presentation is pretty much all apologetics, because this is something that is settled when you talk to geneticists and when you. And it's not just DNA, it's the fact that they knew before DNA studies confirmed it, because they knew from migration patterns, they knew from archaeology.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 13:55 This is not something that was a surprise. It was only a surprise in the sense that now it puts the Book of Mormon in a corner, because the Book of Mormon has been saying something that is now confirmed by a very testable method that we use for so many other aspects of our life, whether it's medical, whether it's, you know, crime, whether it's, you know, sending in our DNA or saliva to 23andMe now the book of Mormon has to then go, what do I, you know, how do we then make sense of the fact that the claims we're making is now refuted to by pretty much every field of study.

John Dehlin 14:23 Yeah, yeah, it's. It's huge. And of course, we've already talked about the problems with the golden plates, the problem with the folk magic, the problem, you know, with the last 116 pages. We haven't, We're. We haven't even yet gotten into the anachronisms and all the problems with the content, you know, but. But this is just a major, major deal. And today we're going to understand all the reasons why. Yep.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 14:47 Okay, so we'll continue with the slides. And so basically we're saying is all the leaders have been saying this. And so if you go to the next slide, what the essay is going to do, and we noticed this, and you have, for those of you listening, if you have not listened, you did it a year long time ago and it's not on video. But I would highly recommend, and we should put in the show notes, the link to your podcast called Three Geneticists Talk about the Book of Mormon DNA essay. Yeah, it's a good one because they do a really good job.

Overview of the Gospel Topics DNA Essay

Mike (LDS Discussions) 15:16 I think it's only about an hour and a half too. So, I mean, that essay I listened to when I was first going through it a few times because it is a lot of in the weeds type stuff, but they make it very understandable. And so one of the things that this essay is going to do, and we'll point it out as we go, is they try to make it sound like this is not easy for us to understand. It's not conclusive, it's very tentative. And what they do in that podcast is they do a really good job of showing why it's not tentative and why it's not that hard to understand.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 15:45 And so I just wanted to point that out before we go into this, because the essay is going to say, the evidence assembled to date suggests that the majority of Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA. Scientists theorize that in an era that predated Book of Mormon accounts, a relatively small group of people migrated from Northeast Asia to the Americas by way of a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska. And again, I'm just pointing out that they're using the word suggest and theorize to kind of. I'm not saying they're poisoning the well, but they're trying to make the science seem like it's just not that conclusive, it's not that solid.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 16:18 And as a way to, if you're the reader of this essay, to make you think right off the bat, well, this is just one idea. It's not necessarily the predominant one. And the problem is, even since this essay, the technology gets better and better and better, and it's telling us the exact same thing. And just the last note, and I put this on the end of the slide because it's important. Imagine you got up on Sunday and and you said that the Book of Mormon suggests something about The Mormon Church or Joseph Smith's first vision suggests that God and Jesus are different people and that the Mormon Church theorizes that they're separate.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 16:53 I mean, the problem is those are words that are used to diminish the other person's claim. And I just want to point that out, because if you flip that, you would not accept it on the other side. And so I really don't. Like, I realize from a technical term it is a theory, like the law of gravity is a theory, but I'm just saying this is far and away conclusive. And it keeps getting tested and tested over and over and over again, and it's telling us the same thing. We're not getting a different picture. And so right off the bat, the apologetics are trying to tell you guys, this is not that big a deal, because we don't really know. We do know.

John Dehlin 17:24 Yeah. Like, one of the most condemning things about this Gospel Topics essay is that it didn't come out, what, 10 or 20 years prior to, like, the church knew this stuff at least a full 10 years prior, and they didn't talk about it. Why did they start talking? Why did this says. I'm assuming this essay came out around 2014.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 17:46 Yeah, I think it was 14 or 15.

John Dehlin 17:48 Why did it come out in 2014? Because the Internet came out in 2000, and. Well, I mean, the Mormon Internet started really getting going in 2004. By 2005, I'm interviewing people. I'm interviewing Simon Southerton or Richard Bushman and others, and members start becoming aware of this DNA problem. And then all of a sudden, people start losing their faith over it. And so the church is forced to create apologetics, whereas before they just preferred to kind of keep. Keep it away from its members so no one would even know about the problem and have no need to understand and apologetic about it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 18:25 Yeah, and it's just like I said, when we, as we go through it, and it's just, you know, we're going to try to keep it at a high level just because you're right, you've had episodes with Simon Sotherton who can do this.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 18:36 Obviously I came and can be in the same room with him on this stuff. But the point is, because of people like Simon, because of people that you've had on your podcast and other people have had, I can understand what the studies are saying, even if I couldn't tell you the specifics. And that's what the church is trying to tell you. You can't do it, except you can. And the only Reason they're telling you not to kind of to take this at face values because it hurts their claim. If DNA had come out and said the Native Americans have large strains of DNA from Jerusalem, do you think they'd be saying that the studies suggest and theorize it?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 19:11 No, they'd be saying the Book of Mormon is true. And that's what I'm saying. And again, this works both ways. It's critic and apologists. I'm just saying they're setting up this essay to tell us there's other ways. And as we go through it, we're going to show a lot of examples to show no that there's just not. And as uncomfortable as that's going to make us, it is what it is.

John Dehlin 19:28 Yeah. And just one more piece of the historical puzzle. What you all need to know is that after Thomas Murphy was threatened with the disciplinary Council for publishing some essays around DNA in the Book of Mormon, Simon Southerton, who we now have a series on Mormon stories with, he came out with a book called Losing a Lost Tribe.

John Dehlin 19:49 He's come up with the follow up book which we're offering for free for anyone who donates to the Simon Sotherson series. But the point is he comes out with Losing a Lost Tribe and what do they do? They excommunicate him. And if you're excommunicated sort of for apostasy past 1992, what that basically means by 2022 is you said something true that was embarrassing and damaging to the church. The church didn't really bother excommunicating people that gave harebrained theories that, that really didn't show the church wasn't true. They only bothered excommunicating people who demonstrated facts about science or history that showed the church wasn't true. And the evidence for the fact that that's what Simon Southerton was doing was that he got excommunicated for his book.

John Dehlin 20:39 So we'll include a link both to his original book and Gerardo, do you remember the update of the new book that Simon is offering?

Gerardo Sumano 20:47 I can't remember.

John Dehlin 20:48 Okay, we'll, we'll, we'll make sure and include a link to Simon's update because it's, it's, it's basically all the DNA evidence updated in 2020 or 2021. And it's, it's a really important piece. So I'll make sure Jen includes that in the show notes. Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 21:04 Is it the Sacred Curse?

John Dehlin 21:05 Yes. Sacred curse. Thank you. Thank you. We will include a link to that as well.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 21:10 Okay. So, yeah, so what we want to do is continue on. And so what we're saying here is just the fact that they're right off the bat, they're trying to make this seem like it's not a solid amount of science that's giving this, even though they changed the introduction. So if we go to the next slide, I think this is where we start to show some areas of DNA in America before the Book of Mormon. And so this is from our overview online. And it just shows, so the DNA of an ancient Alaskan infant called. And I can't pronounce that, but Sunrise Child girl tells us that the first Americans arrived at least 20,000 years ago, which 14,000 years before the biblical fall of Adam and Eve and 17,000 years before the Book of Mormon narrative.

Ancient DNA Evidence from the Americas

Mike (LDS Discussions) 21:51 The next one is a teenage girl known as Naya, whose skeleton, along with eight others, was found preserved underwater in a cave on the Yucatan Peninsula. Collagen from her bones was securely dated to 13,000 years ago. Her DNA has been sequenced. It is fully Native American, directly ancestral to modern Native Americans and descended from Sunrise Child girls people. Naya's dating and genetic makeup is also consistent with recent discovery in Montana of remains of a 12,700, your 100 year old boy known as the Anzik Child. And then one final. Let's just say in May 2020, DNA from the remains of a Siberian man who died about 14,000 years ago revealed him to be the earliest known person in the world to have the specific mix of genes seen in people with Native American ancestry.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 22:33 And the point just to say, not only does the DNA not show that they did not come from Jerusalem, but they're way before the Book of Mormon times. And so when we.

John Dehlin 22:42 Before the Bible times.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 22:44 Before the Bible times. And so that's why DNA is such a tricky thing, because on one hand, we wouldn't rely on it, right? So we all have family members who have done 23andMe, and they're so excited because you find out maybe you have some Native American ancestry. All these other things. I mean, I've heard people that are in the church talk about how they have Lamanite ancestry because they have Native American, but the problem is we also have Neanderthal DNA in those tests and those go back, what, 40,000 years. So when you want to use DNA to show that you're related to or your family comes from certain places, you can't just stop there and be like, well, that's my story.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 23:14 And it's like, no, no, no, we Go back further and further. And the problem is, you know, in the 19th century, we had no knowledge of any of this, so Joseph Smith would have had no way of writing it in. And obviously in the Bible, the only thing that people in the biblical times knew was what was around him. And so the DNA is a problem because it just, it really dates these scriptures to when they were written because they didn't have the information we have today. If, if Joseph Smith writes the Book of Mormon today, you better believe it's going to be completely different, because our worldview is different.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 23:40 And this just shows that even if you want to say the DNA might not match, but it doesn't mean just the location where you come from. It's like the dating is also a huge problem.

John Dehlin 23:51 Yeah. And I just like to summarize for people that get lost in the words and all the science. Well, these quotes that you just showed us say not only pose a problem for the Book of Mormon, but they pose a problem to Mormonism and to the Bible. Because if humans were In North America 20,000 years ago, you know, the Mormon Church teaches even from the Doctrine and Covenants, let alone every prophet, seer and revelator from Adam until today. Russell M. Nelson. We've all been taught that the earth is 7,000 years old, that Adam and Eve literally lived in the garden of Eden six to 7,000 years ago, that there was a global flood.

John Dehlin 24:32 And so this archeological evidence, this DNA evidence showing humans in the americas up to 20,000 years ago not just disproves the Book of Mormon, but also disproves an orthodox reading of Mormonism and the Bible. Literal Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, all of that, which then leads to the Jaredites, the Tower of Babel, which then leads to the Jaredites. All that gets disproven by DNA evidence. Am I wrong? Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 25:00 I think you're right. And Mike mentioned something really important, and this is something Simon always brings up. The Neanderthal DNA. Like Neanderthal is a species that doesn't exist anymore. Right. Like they were before Homo sapiens. And the fact that we can trace Neanderthal DNA in humans today. You know, like I think when I did 20, I'm pulling up my 23andMe, and it says that I have more neanderthal DNA than 93% of the population. The fact that they're able to trace that small part of a species that doesn't even exist anymore, that's huge. Because if you think about that, then how come we can't find even the smallest part of Lehi's DNA or Hebrew DNA, in any of the Native Americans that have been tested so far.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 25:56 Yeah, and that's basically the problem. It's just the fact that we, you know, the information that we can get from this DNA is getting better and better and better, and yet everything we're finding out about the world is getting more and more refined. Except for the Book of Mormon, because the Book of Mormon just. It has no foothold. There's. There's no evidence of it. And in the DNA, the more we learn, the more we realize it's out of place. And again, it's going to make us uncomfortable if you're a believing member, to hear this. But that's why we're doing these overviews, to try to show you and lay out all this stuff side by side, because it is what it is, and it sucks and it's painful.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 26:26 And I get how much it. I mean, just from going through it. And I wasn't born into it, so I wasn't quite as, you know, I know I wasn't as attached to someone who lived it from the moment they were born. But we have to understand that this evidence is real and it doesn't go away just because we are uncomfortable or afraid of it or because we want to wish it away. And it sucks, but it's there.

John Dehlin 26:46 And I just want to refer people, we did recent episodes with Simon Southerton on a literal Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden and on Noah's Flood. Are there others that we've done?

Gerardo Sumano 26:57 Evolution.

John Dehlin 26:58 Evolution. We'll include links in the show notes because those go into depth on these issues. Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 27:04 They're really good. And so if we go to the next slide, we kind of talked about how there were people in America long before the Book of Mormon times. And so you read these parts of Second Nephi, and it says that there shall none come into this land save they be brought by the hand of the Lord. And behold, it is wisdom that this land should be kept as yet from the knowledge of other nations. And they shall be kept from all other nations that they may possess this land unto themselves. So the Book of Mormon absolutely is saying without question that the Americas were completely empty until the arrival of the Jaredites. There's no ambiguity here. There's just no ambiguity. And so none.

Book of Mormon Claims About Populating the Americas

John Dehlin 27:41 None shall come into this land, say they're brought by the hand of the Lord.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 27:45 Yeah, there's just no way around this. And again, we're going to see this as we go through the apologetics. So I Just want to get this out quick, because when people tell you that the Book of Mormon was just part of a larger population, there is no textual evidence for it and a lot of textual evidence against it. So it's not even like the Book of Mormon is kind of ambiguous and we can kind of draw that conclusion. It is saying the opposite. And so just keep these. These passages in mind as we go, because they're so important to kind of understanding why these apologetics just cannot work with the evidence we have.

John Dehlin 28:16 Man, that is just. That is so important. That slide right there.

Gerardo Sumano 28:20 Yeah. Because it's giving the quote from the gospel topic essay from the church's website saying. Oh, no, we like. No one's claiming.

John Dehlin 28:30 The Book of Mormon itself does not claim.

Gerardo Sumano 28:32 Right.

John Dehlin 28:33 That the peoples it describes were either predominant or exclusive.

Gerardo Sumano 28:36 Right, Right. And then. And then you. You juxtapose that with. With the actual. What the actual Book of Mormon says. And it's not only in Second Nephi, my understanding, it's in several other places. Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 28:48 I think it might be. We have. So on LDS discussions.com we have the annotated essay. Who. That was done by a guy I've mentioned before named Kellen. And I swear that essay is awesome. And it goes into way more detail than we'll go into today. So that's another area if you want to read beyond the. Beyond the overview topic for DNA, the annotated essay, which is linked from there. He did such a good job of putting so much information together, and there's so many quotes from leaders and from the Book of Mormon that just show that there's. There's no. There's no confusion here until the DNA testing.

Gerardo Sumano 29:16 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 29:16 Forces them to change course. And I mean, there's just. I don't know what else to say because again, it speaks for itself. We don't have to keep telling you what it says because it's right there for us all to see. And.

Gerardo Sumano 29:25 Yeah.

John Dehlin 29:26 This is reminding me of the 116 pages. Like, the story doesn't change until there's a problem.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 29:31 Yeah.

John Dehlin 29:32 The story changes.

Guest 29:33 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 29:34 I mean, you make a claim, it doesn't happen, and then when the claim doesn't happen, you switch what you say. The. Basically the understanding was of the underlying facts. And in this case, you can't do it because you've already set in stone what the premise of the Book of Mormon is. And so it's just in the reveals of scripture and. Yeah.

John Dehlin 29:51 And 150 years of prophet seers and revelators. Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 29:54 Yeah. It's a problem. And so go to the next one. It's going to kind of hit this a little harder. So in Ether 2, God told the Jaredites that he would send them to that quarter where there had never, never man been to a land of promise reserved for a righteous people.

Gerardo Sumano 30:09 That's the money quote.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 30:11 It is.

Gerardo Sumano 30:12 Because we know that there were people living here 16,000 years ago for sure. Like 23.andMe says that the huge populations of migrations started 16,000 years ago. And then you have the Jaredites 2,000 years ago, and God telling them no one, no man has lived in this land. The one that I'm going to take you to.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 30:39 Yep. And so it's just. It is what? It's right there. And then Helaman, it says, and it came to pass that they did multiply and spread and did go from the land southward to the land northward and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole Earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east. So again, they're saying that population is what populated the Americas. There's no other. You know, nowhere do they mention other population. And then in first Nephi, it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise, as we journeyed in the wilderness, that there were beasts in the forest of every kind, both the cow and the ox and the ass and the horse and the goat and the wild goat, in all manner of wild animals which were for the use of men.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 31:14 So again, it's just showing. There's all these things that they describe being here except for other people. And so, again, if you. If you want to claim there's not other people, the text is telling you the exact opposite. You can't make that claim without dealing with this. And just to say, you know, again, apologists will say, well, the Book of Mormon prophets probably weren't as concerned about other civilizations. So they said, write about them. It's like, no, because they're writing about animals. They find. They're writing about all of these things. They find not only that, but about

Gerardo Sumano 31:41 the plates of the Jaredites that they find.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 31:43 Right, yeah, exactly. And pick any part in the history that we have, the recorded history, where there's a large population that spreads across an entire continent and doesn't have interactions and wars with outside people. It just doesn't happen. And so this is just. We have to hit this now because it really shows how the apologetics are basically trying to create a solution for a problem, but the problem it's just too well set to now say that we can change what the Book of Mormon really says. The Book of Mormon is pretty clear here.

Gerardo Sumano 32:12 Yeah.

John Dehlin 32:13 All right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 32:14 And so the next slide is if you want to say the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin 32:17 Gerardo wants to say something.

Gerardo Sumano 32:18 I just had a question because I've heard apologists saying that the Mulekites are an example of another puppy, another, like, tribe or people that were here.

John Dehlin 32:31 Are we gonna get to that? If we're gonna get to that later,

Mike (LDS Discussions) 32:33 the Mulekites are still from the same place. So, I mean, the problem is, like, even if you want to say that, you'd still find DNA from that same place. Like, it'd be like if, you know, you lived in Utah and someone's like, I can't find any markers that are specifically to Utah. And you're like, well, this other person who lived in Provo was also who came a little earlier. You'd be like, wait, that's still Utah. You know, I mean, like, the mule kites are still coming from the same people. I'm trying to think.

John Dehlin 32:55 Just because they had a different name doesn't mean they're an entirely different.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 32:58 Well, it's. It's. Yeah, because Mulekites are coming from. Isn't that coming from one of Kings Zedekiah's sons or something like that? Right.

Gerardo Sumano 33:04 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 33:04 So you could still track the DNA just as easily because you know where they're coming from. So even that wouldn't really help you because it's not, you know, I mean, you'd still find. You'd find that maybe, but you can't find that either because you're still coming from the same place.

Gerardo Sumano 33:15 And, yeah, I need adds to the point of, like, why are they mentioning the Amulekites, but they're not mentioning the Maya or the Aztecs?

Guest 33:25 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 33:25 So you're gonna mention the Mulekites, but you can't mention the fact that there's this population that's so large it's gonna swallow you up eventually. It defies logic.

Gerardo Sumano 33:32 Yeah.

Joseph Smith's Teachings on Native American Origins

Mike (LDS Discussions) 33:34 And so, going beyond the Book of Mormon, let's listen to what Joseph Smith had to say about how the Americas were populated. Cause this is really important in this important and interesting book. The history of ancient America is unfolded from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel at the conf of languages to the beginning of the 5th century of the Christian era. We are informed by these records that America in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites and came directly from the Tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem about 600 years before Christ.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 34:08 They were principally Israelites of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle to toward the close of the 4th century. The remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country. So Joseph Smith is telling you these are the only people that were in America. Absolutely without question, the Native Americans are the remnant. And again, so if you want to say the Book of Mormon is confused, this is Joseph Smith. He's receiving revelation from God as to who the Lamanites are.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 34:41 There's no ambiguity here. He is making it very clear there was no one else here first. And every Indian is a direct descendant of, from the Book of Mormon times. There's just, there's nothing, there's. There's nothing here you can take and say, okay, this can make the apologetics work, that there. There was other civilizations. It just doesn't exist.

John Dehlin 35:00 And just so people aren't confused, the date there, the date there says 2002.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 35:06 That's from the Ensign that it came from. Yeah.

John Dehlin 35:08 So it's the Wentworth Letter would have been 1830s early.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 35:13 Yeah, late 30s, something like that.38 or something. I'm trying to think.

John Dehlin 35:15 But yeah, and yeah, it's really clear. And this is Joseph writing to somebody else answering those questions.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 35:24 Yeah. And so there's just, again, there's no way around it. And so now we have the Book of Mormon telling us we have Joseph Smith, who, even if you want to say he was just translating the Book of Mormon, would be getting all these revelations at the same time concurrently. So he's got the exact same position. So there's just no ambiguity. And so let's go to the next one, because this will be kind of the trifecta here, which is to say that God himself, through the revelations, is going to make the same argument. So he says, DC 54, doctrine and covenants. Yeah, yeah, DNC 54. And thus you shall take your journey into the regions, westward, unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites.

John Dehlin 35:58 So this God. That's God saying that Lamanites are in Ohio because they end up sending missionaries to Ohio.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 36:06 Right, yeah, because Ohio has a mountain. So I think they do. I know.

John Dehlin 36:09 Missouri, Missouri, Ohio.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 36:11 I think that particular one I think is from Missouri, because I think that's where he's telling. Well, yeah, says Missouri in that one. But, yeah, I mean, the whole belief is that every Native American is a Lamanite because.

Gerardo Sumano 36:21 Well.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 36:22 And there was no one else here.

Gerardo Sumano 36:23 If, if the church, if the brethren really believed that this was coming from God, why are they not sending geneticists to go to Missouri and test, you know, the, the Native American, Native Americans that come out of Missouri? Because God is telling them where the Lamanites are.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 36:38 Yeah, yeah, that's just it. We're being told exactly where to look, and we look and it's wrong. And so at that point, where do you go? The Book of Mormon is making it clear. Joseph Smith's making it clear. God's making it clear through Joseph Smith. And so there's three things where you just, you can't get around it. There's no way to get around it without changing the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin 36:55 It's Book of Mormon, it's Doctrine and Covenants, it's Joseph Smith himself. And it's every prophet, certain revelator between Joseph Smith and Spence W. King.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 37:04 And God.

John Dehlin 37:04 Yeah, and God.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 37:05 Yeah, and God. I mean, it's not ambiguous. And it's frustrating when, when they try to tell you there's some other way to read the Book of Mormon because it's just, they're shutting the door on that when it's written. I mean, it's just, it's so clear. And so let's read the last few of those real quick and then we'll move on. So. DNC19, which is my word to the Gentile, that soon it may go to the Jew of whom the Lamanites are a remnant. So again, they're saying Native Americans come from, you know, from the Jewish population. DNC3 and this testimony shall come to the knowledge of the Lamanites and the Lemonites and the Ishmaelites who dwindle in unbelief because of the iniquity of their fathers.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 37:38 And in. DNC28. And now behold, I say unto you that you shall go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them. So again, remember, the Book of Mormon is about converting the Lamanite back to Christ. And so God's telling them where to find them. He's telling them to go to the Native Americans. And so if there were other populations and the Lamanites somehow were swallowed up, then God would know that there's no Lamanites to preach to. So God thinks they're Lamanites, Joseph Smith thinks they're Lamanites, The Book of Mormon thinks it. And DNA tells us no. And so you either have to say DNA is all wrong, and that's an area you could go, except you're going to be hit really hard because of the fact that DNA has been tested over and over again, or you have to say, this is wrong.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 38:16 I don't know what else to say because these are really tangible truth claims being made. And that's why I would consider this a smoking gun, because they make truth claim after truth claim about this specific thing and it's proven false. And they didn't know at the time we'd have DNA, but now we do, and there's no way around it.

John Dehlin 38:32 Yeah. So if you go. If we could go and if we could take a DNA test to the Native Americans in Missouri and Ohio and sample them, we know that 99.8% of their genes, if not more, would show a direct descendants from Asia. Yeah. So if, if God. If God was sending the missionaries there. Right. If. If God was telling Mormon missionaries to go there, 98.9% or whatever of the Native Americans were, were the wrong people. Well, but the missionaries were preaching to the wrong people only, like, at best, one out of a hundred of the Native Americans.

Gerardo Sumano 39:18 But even the one that. One out of a hundred, we know where they came from. And it's not the Middle East, Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 39:24 Yeah. Then that's the thing. And it's like, you know, one of those things, I guess, to put it into, to date this episode to 2022. It's like, you know, we are told that the Lamanites were the Native Americans, and now we're told that DNA says, well, they're among them. So we don't quite know who the Lamanites are. And it's just like this past April, we're told the, you know, prophets, seers and revelators are saying, we don't know who Heavenly Mother is. So don't ask. They don't even know who the Lamanites are. So, I mean, how could you expect them to know who Heavenly Mother is if they can't tell you who the Lamanites are?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 39:52 Who are the. The entire purpose of the Book of Mormon is to convert them and they don't know who they are. That's a problem. And it's one of those things that they were so sure of until science proved them false. And we're going to have more of those as we continue this series because, you know, the church realizes that this is real when they change the introduction. If they truly believe the science was wrong, they would have dug their heels and said, no, we're keeping it as it is because we know from, from the word of God this is the case. They changed it. And I realized those aren't directly off the gold plates. That's a huge admission to the world to say, you know what? We didn't have this one quite right.

Gerardo Sumano 40:26 Yeah. Because that part, the fact that the Book of Mormon is written for the Lamanites, that's part of the Book of Mormon plates.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 40:33 Yep. It is.

Gerardo Sumano 40:34 Like, it's not. And Bruce R. McConkie invention. That's like what Moroni or Mormon supposedly wrote in there.

John Dehlin 40:41 Do you. Do you. Do you include that little description, Description of who the Book of Mormon was written for? Do you have that in these slides, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 40:47 I don't have Gerardo.

John Dehlin 40:48 I'll have you look that up because it's so important because think about this. The. The Book of Mormon is supposed to be another witness of Jesus Christ. It's supposed to be the keystone of our religion. And literally the, the. The title page that Gerardo's about to look up says who? It's primarily written for. It's not primarily written for white, you know, you know, white Americans of. Of British descent. Right. Or it would have said that we are literally the Gentiles. It's primarily written for the, the children of Israel who are supposed to be the Native Americans or the Lamanites. But now that we know that, now that we know that they are not the Native Americans, who's the Book of Mormon written for?

Gerardo Sumano 41:30 We don't know.

John Dehlin 41:31 Yeah, go ahead and read it. Right.

Gerardo Sumano 41:32 It's here. It says wherefore. It is an. And this is Mormon talking. Wherefore. It is an enrichment of the record of the people of Nephi and also of the Lamanites written to the Lamanites who are a remnant of the House of Israel and also to the Jew and Gentile written by. And it says they're a remnant of the House of Israel. So when, when the Lamanites are a remnant that. I, I didn't know that because apologists are trying to say today, oh, we don't know what Lehi's DNA was, but they're telling us like Mormon is telling us right here, they're part of the House of Israel. So we do know what their DNA would look like. And also to Jew and Gentile written by way of commandment and also by the spirit of prophecy and revelation.

John Dehlin 42:20 But that's secondary. We're secondary Jew and we're secondary. Primarily, it's the Native Americans and Now we don't even know who the Lamanites are. Makes no sense.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 42:30 That's it. And not to hammer on this, but I try really hard to point out through these overviews episodes, we're doing how they all connect back to other problems. And look at the last episode on the 116 pages. We're told God knew 2400 years in advance that Joseph Smith was going to let Martin Harris take the pages and lose them. So he created a second set of plates. And so he made all of these changes. God made all of these preparations for this one little event he knew was going to happen. And yet you're going to read the Book of Mormon and you're going to read the prophets, and you're going to realize God made no adjustments when the Book of Mormon was written for the fact that the Lamanite population was going to be swallowed up and unrecognizable.

John Dehlin 43:04 We were going to all of a sudden not know who they were. For 200 years we'd know who they were, and then all of a sudden we wouldn't know who they were. Where's the scriptural sort of like, support that God saw this coming and he had a way out?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 43:19 Yeah, where is it, Gerardo?

John Dehlin 43:20 Where is it?

Gerardo Sumano 43:22 I don't know.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 43:23 Yeah. So anyway, so we'll continue on because, like I said, this is going to be highly on the essay because of the fact that the problem is pretty obvious. But these verses are showing that Joseph Smith revelations from God are showing that there were other populations in the Book of Mormon in the Americas. And then once DNA kind of showed that Americas were not populated from Jerusalem, this really sent apologists looking for a solution, not based on the evidence, but based on something that could make it work.

Church Leaders' Historical Claims About Lamanites

Mike (LDS Discussions) 43:51 And this is a quote from Apostle Mark Peterson, who has a lot of very lovely quotes out there if you've ever come across him. But he says, and this is so great because he says this in 1981, before DNA testing, he says if there had been large numbers of other peoples here when the Jaredites came or when Lehi arrived, certainly the Book of Mormon would have said so. The land was reserved for the Lord's purposes and for his people. And the Book of Mormon provides their histories. I mean, he's right. Mark Peterson here is right. If there were people, if there were populations even of their own size or bigger, they would have mentioned it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 44:23 And they don't, because the thought at the time was. And we'll get into a little more in future episodes, but the Maldor Myth was this idea that there was this white race that was overtaken by the savage Indians.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 44:34 Savage Indians eradicated the white people and they lived here until the European settlers. This is the worldview of Joseph Smith that he puts into the Book of Mormon. With no exit ramp for the possibility that there were other populations. They. It's. Textually, it's. It's just not there.

Gerardo Sumano 44:49 Yeah. And apologists today, fair Mormon, they're all contending with Apostle Mark Peterson and God. And God and Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon itself.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 45:01 So Mark. Mark Peterson is. Is a machine for. For memorable quotes. But, yeah, I mean, but he's right. In this case. He's right. It would be in there if it. If there was any textual evidence that there were other populations, it would be in the Book of Mormon, and it's not. And that tells you all you need to know. And so we're gonna start getting into the apologetic responses now. And like I said, the problem is really pretty straightforward because the DNA studies have been done over and over and over. And as John mentioned earlier, you know, I mentioned a lot. Smoking guns versus death by a thousand cuts.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 45:32 And this is one area I would fully say is smoking gun because it's a tangible truth claim that we can test with science that has been tested and questioned over and over and over again. And the technology is getting better and better. And so this is not something where we've stopped looking. This is something where they're looking every single day to get drill further and further in. And that's why I've done 23andMe. And it sounds like, Gerardo, you have two. And so you do 23andMe. And I did mine, I think three or four or five years ago. And every month, maybe four, maybe even sooner, they'll say, hey, by the way, we can now test to see if you have a weird taste when you eat a certain food, because they're starting to get these markers that they can test against your existing DNA.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 46:12 So I get updates every couple weeks of new things they can test my DNA from years ago against. So the technology is just getting better and better. There is no ambiguity here. Nothing is changing for the picture with regards to the Book of Mormon people.

Gerardo Sumano 46:27 And shout out to Doug Vincent, who paid for. For me to do 23andMe. But I also did this company.

John Dehlin 46:33 Oh, you did it.

Gerardo Sumano 46:34 Yeah.

John Dehlin 46:34 That's awesome.

Gerardo Sumano 46:35 Somos ancestry, you can just copy the information from 23andMe. And it tells me, I mean, I'm 49 to 50% Native American temper. And from that 50% tells me that I'm 26% Nawa, 10% Maya, 6% Mixteca, and tells me all this, like, Mexican, you know, like Native American tribes. And no laymanite in here.

Guest 47:05 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:06 That's surprising.

John Dehlin 47:07 No laymanite.

Gerardo Sumano 47:08 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:09 So, yeah, I mean. And that's just it. I mean, it's not there, and so.

John Dehlin 47:13 But. But it does. Is there some indication of Asia? Does it?

Gerardo Sumano 47:17 Yeah, well, he tells 23. Andme tells you, like, all this. Like this. 49 or 50%.

John Dehlin 47:23 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 47:23 It comes from Asia 16,000 years ago.

John Dehlin 47:25 Yeah.

Guest 47:26 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:26 And that's amazing, too, because it gives you some timeframes, too. It's not just percentages. It gives you a lot of detail.

John Dehlin 47:31 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:33 And so we're going to start now, kind of hitting more into the apologetics and the next slide, it kind of talks again about basic principles of population genetics, suggests the need for a more careful approach to the data. The conclusions of genetics, like those of any science, are tentative, and much work remains to be done to fully understand the origins of the native populations of the Americas. Nothing is known about the DNA of the Book of Mormon peoples.

John Dehlin 47:57 But really quickly, really quickly, this is. We should have warned people. This is a quote from the essay, Gospel Topics Essay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:03 Yes, it's from the essay, and it's

John Dehlin 48:04 clearly designed to shrink the target and to cause people to question the validity of DNA tests. Right. It's just one that creates plausible deniability and to. To create a fog of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:22 Well, and the thing is, saying tentative is true, like, science does change, but we see that all the time when you're talking about medical stuff. And the problem is when you talk about tentative, you're making the implication that the whole picture can change. And as we've heard from geneticists, again, I highly recommend the old, older podcasts they had done when the essay came out. They go through, like, the stuff that changes is so small, and it's not changing the picture, it's just changing. Maybe instead of saying, people arrived in America 24,000 years ago, maybe it's 30,000 years ago. It's not saying, oh, they didn't actually come until, you know, the Jaredites came.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:56 And so there's nothing here to tell us that. And then I don't mean to sound like I'm being pejorative here. When they say nothing is known about the DNA of the Book of Mormon people, that's one, it's not true. But two, the Book of Mormon people are not historically real because the story has no Historical foothold. So that's kind of a tricky statement for them to make. But the thing is, we do know a lot about what we would expect from the DNA of people described in the Book of Mormon because we get a lot of information as to where they would be coming from.

Gerardo Sumano 49:26 Right?

John Dehlin 49:27 Yeah, yeah. I'm just trying to imagine if, you know, if, if one of the apostles had a, a polyp on their colon and they needed a colonoscopy.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 49:38 Right.

John Dehlin 49:39 Whether they would go, well, science isn't always definitive. You know, science could be wrong. Would they, Would they though, or would they go, okay, doctor, I'm going to get my polyp removed so I don't get colon cancer. Like, it's convenient to, like, backtrack on the, you know. Well, on the reliability of science when it's.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 49:56 It is there.

Gerardo Sumano 49:57 But then if you think about DNA as a science and how, like, it's

John Dehlin 50:04 enough to put people in jail, right?

Gerardo Sumano 50:06 Exactly.

John Dehlin 50:07 If it's enough people to take people out of jail.

Gerardo Sumano 50:09 Exactly. It's enough for that. Like how to, how, how, how tentative is, is it really?

John Dehlin 50:15 Yeah, yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 50:16 And not only that, but, I mean, when you talk about population genetics, and we'll get into that a little bit more, but, you know, we're not, you're, you're not just saying the DNA says this. So we say. So you're saying the DNA says it, and it's backed up by migrations, is backed up by the history we have. It is not just DNA that's telling us where people are coming from.

Gerardo Sumano 50:32 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 50:32 Like I said earlier in this, they knew that the Native Americans likely came from Asia before DNA confirmed it because they had some of the archeological evidence with the Bering Straits. The DNA actually confirmed what they already thought. Which is a really important note to say that this is confirming a lot of other fields of study. It's not sitting on an island all by itself, and we're just forcing that as the only conclusion. This is actually working with everything else, as opposed to with Book of Mormon studies, where you'd have to. Again, you know, I keep saying I'm a jam that square hole in a circle peg because it doesn't fit with anything else that we're doing.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 51:04 And that's really the problem is one side fits, it meshes, it works. We can see it with our own eyes, we can understand it. And on the other side, we're just saying, because we grew up believing this, we have to keep believing it. So we're gonna basically make everything else fit with it. Even though it doesn't fit. And then to me, that's the difference between working off of science and being willing to, like science is willing to change. Science is willing to say, we got this wrong. Here's the adjustment to this particular part of DNA. Whereas with the Book of Mormon it's just like, no, this is our claim.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 51:31 We're not moving off of it because we can't. And that's a big difference that people, I realize we always say it, but you have to really be able to internalize that when you're looking at these issues, especially if you're a believer, to be willing to say, what evidence do I need to be willing to change. Excuse me, to change my position. Because if the answer is there's no evidence, then really you're just, you're not. This isn't really the place for you. This isn't the discussion for you.

John Dehlin 51:55 Yeah, yeah. Beautiful.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 51:58 And so if we go to the next one. This is a quote from your episode with Jamie Hannis Handy, who, by the way, I never met her either, but she was awesome on that episode and was just so. The way she described this stuff was so helpful to me, especially early on because I was so unaware of any of the DNA stuff and listening to her explain it. And you know, Simon was on the episode and I'm so upset, I can't remember the third person. He was not a member of the church.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 52:22 Anyway, she was kind of describing why DNA has evolved and it's not changing the Book of Mormon's outlook for being historical. And she said, if you're looking at DNA in Book of Mormon and the ethnic long term history of indigenous populations, the picture is just like watching a photo load, right? It starts blurry, it starts to get clear. It starts to get clear and we are just getting clearer and clearer and it is still not jiving. So what she's saying is DNA is getting more and more technical and every time we do that, it's getting a higher resolution picture. And every time the picture gets a higher resolution, it's telling us more and more about different DNA profiles of all the people in the world. And every time we do that, it still is not making the Book of Mormon better. It's just telling us over and over again.

Gerardo Sumano 53:04 If anything, it's making it worse.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 53:05 Yeah, exactly. It's just telling us over and over again this did not happen.

John Dehlin 53:08 There's this idea that every time science advances, Mormonism shrinks. And you'll see that with the Flood, you'll see that with the Tower of Babel, you'll see that with DNA in the Book of Mormon. You'll see that with the Book of Abraham. Every single time history or science expands, Mormonism shrinks.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 53:26 It's true, and it's out of necessity. I get it. But it's just one of those things where it's just. It's not intellectually consistent or honest to try to say that it could work if we redefine what the Book of Mormon says. Because again, I said this, I think I've said this in a few episodes now. But every time I look at these sources, I take them at face value. I don't take them at how do I need this to work. And there's a difference. And we don't need to get into this now, but Kerry Mohlstein, who is one of the Egyptologists for the Church, gave a presentation for Fair Mormon.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 53:53 And I don't have the full quote off the top of my head, but he basically says, I start with the assumption that the Book of Mormon is true and anything that comes from the Church is true. And then I fit the evidence, I get into that paradigm. And you can do that. And to a certain extent, if you do that in the sort of every Ensign article you write, we're starting with the conclusion the Church is true. So everything you read here is under that paradigm that's honest. But they're presenting it in a way that's trying to say scientifically we can make this work or at least give a plausibility.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 54:20 But to do so, you're basically trying to knock down so many of the foundational discoveries we've made in order to preserve beliefs that are just not tethered to a historical backbone.

John Dehlin 54:31 Right? Yeah. So this next quote you're going to be reading is an example of the Church trying to shrink. Shrink both the Lamanites and the geography to a super tiny area, because the smaller they can make the population and the smaller they can make the geography, then the harder it is to find the DNA you want to find.

Gerardo Sumano 54:55 Yes.

John Dehlin 54:56 Right. Or you would expect to find.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 54:57 Yeah, and that's exactly what this is. So this next part is again from the Gospel Topics essay. The Book of Mormon provides little direct information about cultural contact between the people as it describes and others who may have lived nearby. Consequently, most early Latter Day Saints assume the Near Easterners or West Asians like Jared Lehi Mulek or their companions were the first or the largest or even the only groups to settle the Americas. Building upon this assumption, critics insist that the Book of Mormon does not allow for the presence of other large populations in the Americas, and that therefore Near Eastern DNA should be easily identifiable among modern native groups. And. Yeah, I mean, they're right.

John Dehlin 55:33 I have to just respond. Where did Mormons get that idea?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 55:36 Yeah, that's just it.

Gerardo Sumano 55:37 I mean, well, it's just the critics and it's not the critics. It's God on Doctrine and Covenants telling Joseph to go to Missouri.

John Dehlin 55:45 It's Joseph, it's God, it's Jesus, it's the Book of Mormon itself.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 55:48 Yeah, that's just the doctrine.

John Dehlin 55:50 At some point, they're not being honest about.

Gerardo Sumano 55:53 They're not being honest.

John Dehlin 55:53 They're trying to hide the. That fact. Fact that prophets, seers and revelators and Scripture got it wrong for 200 years.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 55:59 That's just it.

John Dehlin 56:00 If they were honest, they would just admit that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 56:02 Yeah. At this point, it's just one of those things where it's like to try to offload the blame for this onto critics is just nonsensical because again, they kind of say most Early Latter Day Saints, but it's like, no, they believed it because they were told that by people who claim to be prophets. This is not something that people just decided one day. And they read the Book of Mormon said. I know. I know what they're. I know what they're trying to say. It's.

John Dehlin 56:25 No.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 56:25 Joseph Smith, as we read earlier, was telling them exactly who the Native Americans are.

John Dehlin 56:29 The Book of Mormon believed it. The Book of Mormon told them who the Native Americans were. Yeah, we already proved that.

Gerardo Sumano 56:35 God said it. Like, I just can't get over that.

John Dehlin 56:38 It's not critics.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 56:39 Like, no, it's not critics.

John Dehlin 56:40 That's like poisoning the well to just throw the word critics in there. It's just a way to poison the well, I think.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 56:46 And not only that, but when they use the word critics, they're making it too. They're offloading that term on to it. Like, if you're a believing member and you are looking for this DNA and you're upset because you're not finding it, and it's troubling you, they're now throwing the word critic onto you. So they're basically saying, if you follow the same line of thought, you are therefore a critic. And I think these essays are written very carefully. And so those words are not just thrown in there haphazardly. And so to use the word critic is. Yeah, it's to diminish not just the people bringing it up, but it's also to keep people who are reading this essay who do have questions in the back of their mind to know that the church is viewing that they are looking at these members as being critical as well.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 57:25 And so you got to keep that in mind. And it does oftentimes accomplish that task. And so we covered this earlier, but the reason the Book of Mormon provides little direct information about cultural contact between the peoples it describes and others who may have lived by, as the essay says, is because there's none. And the point is, why would anyone expect there to be any information such as that when it was meant to be clear that the Book of Mormon's Lamanites were the ancestors of the Native American? Like, not only does it not describe it, but why would anyone even expect there to be it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 57:54 Because it wouldn't. If there was that kind of a description, you would have to rewrite the whole story because you wouldn't just throw that out there and then just, you know, leave it. And so the fact that it's not there, no one expects there to be because it doesn't fit the story or what the leaders were teaching about it anyways.

Gerardo Sumano 58:08 Yeah, that's funny that they say little direct information about cultural contact between people. Yeah, well, there's none. It's not little. It's. It's none.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 58:17 Literally, there's none.

Gerardo Sumano 58:18 Doesn't mention any.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 58:19 Yeah, I mean, and so they would say little because it probably, like you said, the Milkites, but that doesn't fit because it's still from the same place. So that would in any way accomplish their need to find a way for the Book of Mormon people to intermingle with people who were from East Asia.

Gerardo Sumano 58:32 Yeah.

John Dehlin 58:32 Yeah, that's a problem.

Geneticists Respond to the Church's DNA Essay

Mike (LDS Discussions) 58:34 So now we're going to kind of go into their section of the apologetics with DNA and kind of the different areas of that. And so I already did this earlier, but I just want to recommend it's. Three geneticists respond to the LDS essay on DNA in the Book of Mormon. It's audio only, but like I said, it's such a good listen. And it really takes what seems like an overly complex topic and makes it consumable for people like me, who obviously have no background in science and genetics. But just, again, it's a shout out to them and to John for that episode because it was very helpful to me. And I just want to throw that out there before we get going, because a lot of the explanations kind of come from them because they explained it so well.

John Dehlin 59:14 Excellent.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 59:15 And, you know, we talked about this earlier, but from the essay, it says, a brief review of the basic principles of genetics will help explain how scientists use DNA to study ancient populations. It will also highlight the difficulty of drawing conclusions about the Book of Mormon from the study of genetics. And so right away, they're trying to tell us. They're trying to tell the members what science can do and what science can't do. And so they're calling it tentative. They're saying that it's limited. They're saying it can't draw conclusions about the Book of Mormon. I just. I think at some point, they're trying so hard to poison the well here. So when you leave this essay, you just go, yeah, I can see why there's some issues, but obviously we'll get there someday. We'll find it out later. You know, the evidence is just around the corner.

John Dehlin 59:56 Yeah, well, the problem is dying to jump in.

Gerardo Sumano 59:59 The problem, Mike, is not. It's not that we can't draw a conclusion from science. The problem is that we already have the conclusion given to us by God and the Book of Mormon. Yep. And then that would have that conclusion that we already have, that we've been. We've been given by God. It's like science would. Would prove that, Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:00:20 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:00:21 So they're saying, oh, science can't conclude that the Book of Mormon is true. Well, the problem is that we have the conclusion. We have what it's supposed to. To be. And science is not proving that. In fact, it's disproving the conclusion.

John Dehlin 1:00:33 Another way to look at this would be, let's just say we. We knew what, you know, Middle Eastern DNA looked like. Let's just say we knew that. And we probably do.

Gerardo Sumano 1:00:43 We do.

John Dehlin 1:00:44 Okay, so. And then let's just say that when we did the DNA test of Native Americans, it was a perfect match. It's like, oh, my gosh, all the Native Americans have the same DNA as the ancient Israelites. Is there any of us who seriously think the church would go, well, don't make too much of that. Don't make too much of that, because science can, of course, the church would, like, spike the football, you know, shake their legs like we're number one, and tell the whole world the church was true and that science proved it. But because science says the opposite, what are they doing? They're basically trying to devalue science or devalue the validity of DNA evidence, Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:01:23 Yeah, that's just it.

John Dehlin 1:01:24 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:01:24 Yeah. I mean, that's 100. Right. And so, I mean, look what they

John Dehlin 1:01:27 do with chiasmus, which is like the world's worst apologist. Genetics or.

Gerardo Sumano 1:01:32 Nahum, the three, three letter, three letter

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:01:34 was another one where you're just like you're trying to, you're trying to, to fit the conclusion to the evidence. And in this case the evidence is so overwhelming that you had to change your introduction. And yet it was, it was overwhelming enough to where you change your introduction. But at the same time you're not willing to back off whatsoever from the historicity of the Book of Mormon, which they're gonna have to do eventually. But in this case, yeah, they're just attacking the messenger. And so this one is from our annotated essay and this is an example that was done by Kellen when he did it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:02:01 And I love it because it makes sense. So I'm gonna read you an example that basically mirrors the DNA problem for the Book of Mormon, except it's not from the Church's point of view. And I want you guys to think of what you would, how you'd respond. So lets imagine that the senior director of NASA once claimed that the moon is made of green cheese. But when astronauts landed, they found none. The obvious conclusion would be that the moon is not, nor was it ever made of green cheese. Now suppose NASA hired some lunar apologists to write an essay to explain away this embarrassing discrepancy.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:02:30 This essay would consist of a series of convoluted explanations and arguments about how although today we know the moon is made of minerals, we should nevertheless give credence to the director's authoritative claim that that the moon's chemistry was once predominated by dairy products. They would then proceed to give you several hypotheses about how the cheese might have transmitted into something else or otherwise disappeared. They would then use some sciency talk to help you feel comfortable that people smarter than you are on top of the cheese problem and that if you just change your expectations about what the NASA director actually meant by grain and cheese, you'll be able to satisfy yourself that the complete absence of cheese is somehow just what the really smart people should have been expecting all along.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:03:07 And that you should never let your personal feelings inform your belief that about the long ago presence of moon cheese, you might even be shamed for naively expecting to find cheese on the moon today and criticized for lacking the faith to believe it was really there when the director made the claim.

John Dehlin 1:03:22 Yeah, it's more like. But they would also go, well okay, we never said that the whole moon was made of green cheese.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:03:30 And there's that too.

John Dehlin 1:03:32 It's just that where they actually took the samples, you know, there wasn't but if they had gone to a different part of the moon, then they would have found the green cheese there. But they didn't. They went to the wrong part.

Gerardo Sumano 1:03:44 Yeah, yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:03:45 And it's just, I mean, like, silly example. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:03:47 The fact that the astronauts, like, found minerals. We can't draw too many conclusions from

John Dehlin 1:03:52 that because what is cheese? And the cheese would have deteriorated over time, and so now the dust that would be there. Look, we don't know what, we don't know what cheese looked like back when it was actually made of cheese.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:04:05 Yep.

John Dehlin 1:04:06 Plus the erosion of cheese over time.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:04:08 Yeah, that's just it. And again, it's meant to be silly, but the whole point is, if you read this essay and you went to somebody else and we've talked about this in other episodes, and you replace the church, any marker to knowing it's the church in the Book of Mormon, and you said it was another religion and that the leader of the religion made some claim, it was proven false, and this is how they're trying to tell you. It could still be plausible.

Gerardo Sumano 1:04:28 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:04:28 Any believing member who doesn't quite already understand what you're trying to do here would go, oh, yeah, they're making it up because, you know, the over the evidence is so overwhelming.

Gerardo Sumano 1:04:36 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:04:36 And so in this essay, they're just, they're trying to basically make all of these different conclusions about what science can and can't do and what it can and can't say. And they're doing it in a way that would just. It would never pass peer review. And they know it. And so they put this out here in this very carefully worded essay, and this is the best they have. And so that's why I wanted to cover this essay predominantly because it really is the best arguments the church has to offer. And more importantly, these are the arguments the church is willing to put out. So that's why I didn't want to cover, like some of the people maybe who are making arguments that are maybe a little bit more out there. This is the most standard apologetic they have. And so this is when they.

Gerardo Sumano 1:05:12 As honest as they know how to be.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:05:14 Yeah, I mean, pretty much, yeah. This is, this is, I would argue this is like as honest as they feel like they can be without rooting church.

John Dehlin 1:05:22 Without completely ruining. Ruining the church.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:05:24 Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that they know how far they can go before they risk telling too much and also be willing to say, well, we still told you guys what we knew. And so they say at the present time, scientific consensus.

John Dehlin 1:05:36 Okay. Wait, what is this quote?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:05:37 This is from the essay. This is from the essay, and it's about dating the arrival of people to America. Okay, this is apologetics.

John Dehlin 1:05:45 This is apologetics.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:05:46 Yes, this is from the church's essay. And so it says, at the present time, scientific consensus holds that the vast majority of Native Americans belong to the sub branches of the Y chromosome haplogroups C and Q14, and the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups A, B, C, D and X, all of which are predominantly East Asia. And then the footnote that they have here just basically confirms that Native Americans arrived long before the Book of Mormon would have been, you know, happened anyways. And then they say, but the picture is not entirely clear. Continuing studies provide new insights and some challenges, and some challenge previous conclusions. For example, a 2013 study states that as much as one third of Native American DNA originated anciently in Europe or West Asia and and was likely introduced into the gene pool before the earliest migration to the Americas.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:06:30 This study paints a more complex picture than is suggested by the prevailing opinion that all Native American DNA is essentially East Asian. And if you go to that study,

John Dehlin 1:06:40 that sounds promising, I'm interested.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:06:45 Yep. And so basically, this is why when I talk about apologetics need to be consistent. This is a good example, because if you take the 2013 study at face value, it destroys the historicity of not just the Book of Mormon, but Adam and Eve, because they're literally telling you that this DNA was introduced long before the Book of Mormon would have happened or Adam and Eve would have lived in Missouri. And so by creating this line of apologists, you're blowing up the Book of Mormon anyways.

John Dehlin 1:07:08 And so but they don't mention that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:07:10 They don't mention that. And it's like, and they say before the earliest migrations, because by saying that, it avoids saying long before Book of Mormon times would have happened anyways. And so either way, that would not help their case, because even if you could show DNA that came here, say, 20,000 years ago, it wouldn't help the Book of Mormon in any possible way. And that study still is not consensus. That's still like finding one bit of information that you then extrapolate. You try to extrapolate to say, well, that means everyone has it and it's not the case. Thethe overwhelming DNA is still East Asian, but there are going to be remnants.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:07:44 I thinki think that might've been the study where they found like a bone or something like that, and they tested and they found some of that DNA. But even still, it's long before the Book of Mormon. So even if you want to do that, it still shows that the Book of Mormon, it doesn't help the Book of Mormon in any way possible. I guess what I'm saying.

John Dehlin 1:07:59 Yeah, if they were going to be honest, they would use that. They would cite that study and say, okay, this creates a little bit of new information they didn't have before. But in all fairness, it completely destroys the Doctrine and Covenants saying that the earth is 7,000 years old. And, and it, and it makes it so there was, there was humans before Adam and Eve. It destroys the fall, it destroys the garden, it destroys the Noah's Flood, the Tower of Babel, which destroys the Bible and the Book of Mormon. And they just fail to mention any of that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:08:30 That's the, and that's the problem. And that's why it's like you gotta be. It's, you know, there's, there's those cartoons like when I was growing up, they'd be like Looney Tunes or something. And they'd say, maybe not Looney Tunes, but like Alvin and the Chipmunks or somewhere. They'd say, you gotta clean your room. And so there'd be this rug in the middle of the room. And so they'd shove everything under the rug. Cause they didn't wanna actually clean it. And every time you push them under the rug, then another person of the rug would pop up.

John Dehlin 1:08:47 Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:08:47 Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Yeah, that's what this feels like. Because every time you shove one part of Apologetics under the rug, but you don't actually answer the underlying problem, it just pops up somewhere else. And so you think you solve the DNA, but then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait, crap, I just completely demolished the entire premise that the Book of Mormon happened, you know, or Adam and Eve, you know, and so that's why I just want there to be consistency when you make that claim that DNA is okay because there might have been some introduction of non Eastern Asian DNA before the earliest migration. You're talking 20, 30000 years ago. You're not talking Book of Mormon times. And they know that the study tells you that.

John Dehlin 1:09:25 Yeah, yeah. This, this reminds me of when Brian Hales tries to claim that Joseph Smith didn't have sex with any his plural wives. But at the same time, the Book of Mormon says the whole point of polygamy is to raise a righteous seed. You can't make that argument that Joseph. There's no evidence for offspring and still believe the Book of Mormon. It's, it's just, it's providing evidence in isolation that, that contradicts your evidence or your arguments in all the other areas. It's dishonest.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:09:54 And that's all it is. It is. And so the next slide, it kind of talks about just how this essay continues to muddy the waters. And so the essay, the Church's essay says, while Near Eastern DNA markers do exist in the DNA of modern native populations, it is difficult to determine whether they are the result of migrations that predated Columbus, such as those described in the Book of Mormon, or whether they stem from genetic mixing that occurred after the European conquest. And this is what, actually, this is what Gerardo had mentioned earlier. So 99.6% of Native American DNA is from East Asia. The remaining 0.4% has been determined to be primarily Spanish and African post colonization admixture.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:10:36 So Simon Southerton answered that question when he did the podcast with you guys way back when. Which is to say, even if you want to say there's 0.4% remaining that we don't know about, it still does not match the Book of Mormon claims at all. And so the Church here is using the little bit of ambiguity we have in the DNA to muddy the waters and say we just can't know.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:10:56 And the problem is we can DNA, as Gerardo said earlier, when you get a 23andMe test, which is like 100 bucks now, not only do they tell you the areas that your population genetics come from, but they usually give you a pretty decent timeframe as when they were there. And so this just isn't something now that we can't know either, that we know both the place and the time. And so to muddy the waters is just saying, well, there might be this chance somewhere against all of the evidence. And I just think it, again, you wouldn't make that claim if it was the other way around and this was supporting you.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:11:28 You would say, oh, this is the most amazing evidence we've ever seen. But because it tells you that your claims are wrong, you're just saying, well, who knows what it really means?

John Dehlin 1:11:36 Got it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:11:37 And then just to keep going with this. So this is the whole thing. This is again from the essay. Scientists do not rule out the possibility of additional small, small scale migrations to the Americas. And the Church is citing a National Geographic article which is kind of an infamous one within Mormonism. And what the article talks about is a 24,000 year old Malta boy in Siberia.

John Dehlin 1:11:58 There's already a problem 24,000 year old years ago

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:12:02 whose DNA indicates that not only was he ancestral Native Americans, but his ancestors have roots in the Near East. This is actually further evidence against the Book of Mormon because it dates the DNA of ancient Americas to 20,000 years before the Book of Mormon times. So it could not possibly have come from the Jaredites or the Lehigh and would also imply that the global flood never occurred because this DNA is going to continue uninterrupted until the populations come in modern times. So I mean, again, you're making these claims and I pretty sure on your essay with Jamie Handis handy, I think she actually said something like, are these people even reading what they're talking about?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:12:38 Because you're citing this National Geographic and I still get it cited to me on Twitter and stuff all the time today. And I'm like, do you understand that if you want to take that claim that the Book of Mormon, Adam and Eve, all of that immediately dies? So if you want to do that, you can, but you're shooting yourself in the foot. And most people don't understand that. They just see the headline or they see the little clip that someone will share on Facebook and say, see, we knew all along. They don't read it and they just keep spreading it. It's like, no, no, no, this actually makes it worse for you.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:13:08 You just don't realize it because you're not looking at the dating. And you know, again, it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know, we don't really need to say more than that. It's just if you're going to make that apologetic, you got to understand the implications of what you're saying.

Gerardo Sumano 1:13:20 Totally. And yeah, well, there's so many problems with this because the essays citing this as it says small scale migrations, but the whole idea about the Jaredites and the Lamanites and the Nephites is that they became huge, huge populations. Right.

John Dehlin 1:13:39 That cover the east, north, south, west, all the lands, millions of soldiers.

Gerardo Sumano 1:13:45 Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:13:46 Yeah. And that's just it. And so we're gonna jump in now to some of the more specific things and I'm gonna try. Oh, this is going. Actually, sorry I missed this one I was looking through over here. For example, a 2010 genetic analysis of a well preserved 4000 year old Paleo Eskimo in Greenland led scientists to hypothesize that a group of people besides those from East Asia had migrated to the Americas.

John Dehlin 1:14:08 Now what is that quote from?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:14:10 This is from the asses.

John Dehlin 1:14:11 Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:14:12 And One of the things, and this is what Kellen in our annotated essay put. This is actually a great attestation to the power of population genetics because this Paleo Eskimo dates to Jaredite times, but their DNA leaves no mystery about where they came from. So what we're saying is in this case we're able to find exactly where this person is from in a 4,000 year old skeleton. So they're actually kind of again, showing us how powerful and specific and good using DNA is. And so again, to the point in our annotated essay says what would be amazing in contrast would be if we had a Mesoamerican skeleton from Jaredi times with genetic material of Middle Eastern origin.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:14:49 But that hasn't happened. And so the opposite is true. Which makes you wonder why the Church included this. Because the Church wants you to think this is proof that, you know, well, anything can happen. But it actually, they're giving us proof of how good and specific DNA can be. And that makes you go, well, then why haven't we found anything for the Book of Mormon if we can find it here? You know what I mean? Especially when you're talking about millions of people across the United States. That's a problem.

John Dehlin 1:15:12 That's a really, it's a really good point.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:15:14 Yeah, and so I think that's a really good point. And again, all throughout these essays, you just see these examples and you're like, why are you putting them in here? It actually hurts you. But it's because they feel better.

John Dehlin 1:15:24 The game they're playing. It's not a game of help. Members really understand the science and the context and what the probability is for the Book of Mormon being true. They literally just want to throw some PhDs and throw some jargon at the members with some specious arguments so that the Mormons go, oh, I don't understand all this. It's really technical. But as smart PhDs, you know, stand behind it and these words all sound really technical, there must be good enough explanations. And now I don't have to worry about it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:15:59 Yeah, I think that's what it is. It's like, what's the phrase? Smarter people than me have looked at it and they're okay with it. So I am. And I think that's really what it boils down to.

Gerardo Sumano 1:16:06 And again, like we said, for all these arguments to work and to even give like the smallest amount of possibility that the Book of Mormon could be true, you have to literally dismiss the whole foundation that we give in the first hour or 30, 40 minutes of this episode about God saying who the Lamanites are, about the Book of Mormon saying that they spread through the land, that no one was here before. You have to literally throw that whole foundation on the trash before you can start considering this arguments that the Church is putting forward.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:16:44 Yep.

John Dehlin 1:16:45 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:16:46 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:16:47 Okay.

Founder Effect and Population Bottleneck Arguments

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:16:47 All right. So now we're going to look at what they call the founder effect. And from the Church's essay it says one reason it is difficult to use DNA evidence to draw definitive concepts, conclusions about Book of Mormon peoples is that nothing is known about the DNA that Sarah or Lehi, Sariah, Ishmael and others brought to the Americas. Even if geneticists had a database of the DNA that now exists among all American Indian groups, it would be impossible to know exactly what to search for. It is possible that each member of the emigrating parties described in the Book of Mormon had DNA typical of the Near East.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:17:16 But it's likewise possible that some of them carry DNA more typical of other regions. In this case, their descendants might inherit a genetic profile that would be unexpected given their family's place of origin. And this phenomenon is called the Founder effect. And so what they're saying is until you have the exact DNA from one of the Book of Mormon people, we don't know what to look for because we don't know who the founder of the civilization in America was. And let's just go straight to the next slide because this is easier. Just kind of go straight into.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:17:42 The Book of Mormon clearly tells us that Lehi's family were Israelites from Jerusalem. Is this essay asking us to consider that the Lehigh's might have actually been the descendants of Siberians who had relocated temporarily to Jerusalem before they built a ship ship and came to America? And the reason is just saying, like, we know where they're coming from, we know what to look for. And this is an article from. Well, this essay was predating the website change, but from lds.org titled who and where are the Lamanites? And they explain in this composite group is the blood of Israel. For we know that Lehi was of the tribe of Manasseh, that Ishmael was of Ephraim, and that Mulek was of Judah, being a descendant of King David through Zedekiah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:18:21 So don't get sidetracked by the fact that they're saying we don't have the DNA to look for the founder effect from the people coming off of the boat because we're not using DNA profiling on individual. We're looking at population genetics and that is a huge difference. And they're trying to kind of conflate the two, I think, to try to say, because we don't have, you know, Lehi's skeleton, we can't know.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:18:43 And so if you want to believe the Book of Mormon history, they tell you exactly where they're coming from. We know who one of the founders was, which you had mentioned earlier. Mulek, the son of King Zedekiah. That's a lineage that's known because we know where they were from, we know when they were from. What more could you ask for? This is actually almost too much.

John Dehlin 1:18:59 We don't have a saliva sample or a hair sample from Lehi, so we can't know. And you're saying, well, we know what the people who lived in his time. We know what their DNA would have looked like.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:19:11 Exactly. And so to make that claim, it's just. It's muddying the waters and it's trying to say, well, maybe if we had that they would actually show that they were from a different part of the world. But because we have different descriptions that are really specific from the Book of Mormon, we know exactly where they are. So, again, you're trying to throw out scenarios that just don't have any basis in the text of the Book of Mormon to say maybe there's a chance. But again, that just doesn't work if we're being intellectually honest with what we have to work with.

John Dehlin 1:19:37 So if God was smart enough to create multiple versions of the plates to fool Lucy Harris, wouldn't it have been cool if God had gotten Lehi to leave a saliva sample or a hair sample so that when Joseph is, like, exhuming the plates, there'd be the Sword of Laban, there'd be the Urim and Thummim, there'd be all the different versions of the plates, and then a little test tube with a saliva sample or like a lock of hair. A lock of hair from Lehi. And then we could have just done the deal DNA test and known, you would think.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:20:11 I mean, yeah, that's just it. It's just like, you know, again, it's like one we've talked about before. But the things Joseph Smith's in control of makes he gets his believers to make sense. But these things, he had no idea DNA was going to come in. So of course you wouldn't plan for it.

John Dehlin 1:20:24 He.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:20:24 The Book of Mormon doesn't plan for anything in the future. And we'll get to that again.

Gerardo Sumano 1:20:27 But it's like all of this up all the way to Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin 1:20:31 It cleans up. It cleans up the messes.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:20:33 Yeah, exactly. And it's just. Yeah, it's a mess. And so the next slide kind of makes this point a little bit more. And so we're talking about the founder effect still. And in addition to the last slide, we know one of the reasons Lehi needed the brass plates was that they contained his genealogy. So the Book of Mormon tells us he was a descendant of Joseph. So there's no reason for the church propose that we're trying to find some weird offshoot where they moved to some other area, then came in and then left. You know, we know exactly the genealogy, and they make that a big reason to get the brass plates.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:21:02 Andand this is another one from. From Kellen, who did the essay, but says, sure, we don't have the exact remains of Lehi's family to compare to, but that's a diversion because we know where Lehi's family came from. That's the whole reason that for$99.23andMe can use your DNA to show where your ancestors came from, not because they dug up your great great great grandmother's family, but because of the advancements in population genetics that tell us about their migrations going back to the Neanderthals. So, again, if you want to believe that DNA is wrong and that all of the stuff about Neanderthals is just incorrect stuff, you can make that claim.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:21:32 But if we trust population genetics enough to do that to, I mean, my goodness, all sorts of medical advances, archaeological advances, all this stuff, then you cannot argue we don't know where the Book of Mormon people came from. They give you almost too much information. They almost make it too specific so we know exactly what to look for.

Gerardo Sumano 1:21:48 It's way too specific. Yeah, it is.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:21:50 There's no ambiguity here.

John Dehlin 1:21:54 And by the way, if you don't believe there's any validity to DNA testing, you should be working in the courts and the judicial system to make sure that no one's ever put in jail because of DNA testing or that no one's ever exonerated and let out of jail. That would be a huge injustice to the world. So if you're going to invalidate it wholesale, you've got a lot of social justice work to do, by the way.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:22:19 Yep. And that's the problem. And so if we go to the next one, this is another one. This is from the essay as well, from the church. And they say, consider the case of Dr. Dr. Hugo Perego, who's likely the Author of the essay a Latter Day Saint population geneticist. His genealogy confirms that he is a multi generation Italian. But the DNA of his paternal genetic lineage is from a branch of the Asian Native American haplogroup C. This likely means that somewhere along the line, a migratory event from Asia to Europe led to the introduction of DNA atypical of Perego's place of origin. If Perego and his family were to colonize an isolated landmass, future geneticists conducting a study of his descendants Y chromosome might conclude that the original settlers of that landmass were from Asia rather than Italy.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:23:00 And again, this is silly because the DNA still shows the Italian lineage. So that's the problem. Like, even if, like, we're not arguing that the Book of Mormon is showing that the Israeli, the Jerusalem genealogy is out of order, we're saying it's non existent. In this example, the DNA is still showing his Italian lineage. It also shows the East Asian.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:23:23 So it's like one of those things where it's like, why is the church trusting Dr. Prager's DNA story but not the one that says that the Book of Mormon is not historical? Because again, this example makes our point. It's not that it's out of order, it's not that it's out of place. It's non existent. And that's the difference we're not showing. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but it's not like Native American DNA is saying that there was these strains or these markers that left Jerusalem, but it just doesn't match the timing. They're not there. And so their example is making it sound like, because it would be out of order with, you know, Italian versus Asian, that they would confuse geneticists and it might confuse them, but they would still know both of those places. It's just, it's a bad example.

John Dehlin 1:24:04 You know what we need, Gerardo? You know how we have Michael Coe to talk about archeology and anthropology. We've had Robert Rittner come to talk about Book of Abraham and Egyptology. We just had a professor talk about Noah and the Flood, a geologist. And we need a geneticist that isn't Simon Southerton, who's never been Mormon, to come talk about genetics, the Book of Mormon and DNA. That would be good because why haven't we done that yet? Will you write that down? What if he's right? Because Simon Southerton, well, he's Mormon even though he was a bishop. I mean, the weird thing is Simon Southerton was a bishop and a geneticist before he learned about these problems with DNA in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin 1:24:47 Yeah, so that should make him a credible witness. But now apologists have managed to smear him and, you know, poison his well, so let's get a non Mormon geneticist to do an episode. Let's remember to talk to Simon about that. Okay, Sounds good.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:25:03 Okay, so now we got a couple slides here just to show that there's no confusion as to who the Native Americans are from the church's leaders. And so Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley confirmed the identity of the native people of the Americas as Lamanites. And his. His dedication of Juarez Temple, he said, may the sons and daughters of Father Lehi grow in strength and fulfillment of the ancient promises made concerning. Concerning them. Elder James E. Foss.

John Dehlin 1:25:28 That was in 1999. Keep. Keep going.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:25:30 Yeah, yeah, says 99. So Elder James E. Fost in 2000 said, we invoke thy blessings upon this nation of Mexico where so many of the sons and daughters of Father Lehi dwell.

John Dehlin 1:25:39 I was.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:25:39 In 2000, President Thomas S. Monson referred to the attendees of the Villa House of Mexico Temple dedication is children of Lehi. And President Hinckley said the members attending the Ecuador temple that they have the blood of Lehigh in their veins. President Kimball in 1960, spearheaded the Indian placement program with the intention that the Lamanites among us could have their curse removed and once again become white and delightsome of this program. He said, the day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome and now. And they are now becoming white and delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the Hogan's on the reservation.

John Dehlin 1:26:19 Oh, that's so gross.

Gerardo Sumano 1:26:20 But this brings the point that, like, we should be testing all these Mexican people and like, why is the church not going out and testing the Maya, the people in Ciudad Juarez, in Villahermosa? It should be showing Lehi's DNA. It should be showing Middle Eastern DNA. Why is the church relying as the strongest evidence for the plausibility of the Book of Mormon being true, some bones that were found from 4, 000 years ago, and that doesn't even match the timeline of the Book of Mormon.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:26:50 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:26:51 And just to really. And just to really back up this point, I served a mission in Guatemala. I spent two years, well, 18 months amongst the. The Guatemalan people. They had no doubt that they were laymanites. You asked any Guatemalan, they referred to themselves as Lamanites. They were proud to Be Lamanites. And, and they were told by missionaries and prophet seers and revelators and mission presidents that came to Guatemala that they were. It wasn't like, hey, a few of you might be Lamanites. We just don't know which ones. All of them, all of the Guatemalans thought they were Lamanites. Gerardo, what's your. What's your witness as a Mormon race?

Guest 1:27:31 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:27:32 If you go to Mexico today, like all members, I think 90% of members will. Will tell you that they have the blood of Lehigh running in their veins.

John Dehlin 1:27:43 Yeah. And if the church were honest, now that they know the DNA evidence shows that most if not all of the Latino Americans and Pacific Islanders aren't descendants of lehi. They would, they would tell them. They would say, hey, state conference, area conference. Maybe they would even go to general conferences, say, hey, Latin Americans, Pacific Islanders. I know that for two centuries we told you all you were Lamanites. You know, which. Which in and of itself was disgusting and gross and racist and offensive because of the dark skin, sin, wickedness, connotation. Aside from that, we now know through genetics that probably most, if not all of you are not Lamanites. And we want to just clear that up. Stop calling yourselves Lamanites. But do they do that, Gerardo? Have they done that?

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:31 No.

John Dehlin 1:28:31 Your parents are still in Mexico. If they have, they sent that memo out to your parents.

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:35 No, my dad is a bishop. He would have received it.

John Dehlin 1:28:39 And that's. That's a big deal. Right? If, you know, if the church in 2022 knows that half of its membership are referring themselves, referring to themselves with a fictitious or with a non accurate identity, isn't that incumbent upon the church to let them know they should stop doing that?

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:58 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:28:58 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:59 I think if they were the ones who told them that they were Lamanites in the first place. Right.

John Dehlin 1:29:05 That would be the honest thing to do.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:29:06 Yeah, they would.

John Dehlin 1:29:07 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:29:08 Okay, well, we'll continue on because this is kind of going. So obviously we have this slide and then the next slide, it just again talks about church manuals. They were not confused about DNA until the testing came out. Official church manuals have consistently taught the native. The native peoples of the Americas and the Pacific Islands are Lamanites.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:29:25 Great numbers of Lamanites in North and South America and the South Pacific are now receiving the blessings of the gospel. So this also lumps in the Polynesians with the Native Americans into a single lineage. That destroys any attempts of this essay to explain why the specific DNA problems concerning Native Americans are okay. You know what I mean? Because now they're putting them together as the same population.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:29:44 And because the Pacific Islanders come from an entirely different part of Asia than the American Indians, it makes more problems. And the islands that are specifically identified by modern prophets as being in apostles, as being popular by Haggarth and its descendants, were actually settled long after the Book of Mormon times. Again, this is where you just complicate yourself with one problem over after another. So if you want to combine the South Pacific with the Native Americans, it just makes all of this stuff even worse for them, because now you're making truth claim upon truth claim, and they're incompatible with each other anyways.

John Dehlin 1:30:20 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:30:22 So population bottleneck is the next big area where the. The essay focuses. And this is from, again, from the church's essay, which is to say, population bottleneck is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a natural disaster, epidemic, disease, massive war, or other calamity results in the death of a substantial part of the population. These events may severely reduce or totally eliminate certain genetic profiles. In such cases, a population may regain genetic diversity over time through a mutation, but much of the diversity that previously existed is irretrievably lost. Which is to say, if you have four or five different populations, something horrible happens to one or two of them.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:30:56 Their color in this particular. If you're watching this, the picture is a bunch of marbles. Their colored marbles may fall off because they're dead. So you don't really have that if the other people never intermixed with them. And so what they're trying to say is if the Book of Mormon people lived with another population, were all killed off and then just kind of faded away and were overwhelmed, their markers would disappear. And if you go to the next. We'll just go to the next slide.

Gerardo Sumano 1:31:18 Doesn't the Book of Mormon, when Nephi is getting the revelation from the angel and he's seeing his brothers Layman and Lemuel's descendants conquered by Christopher Columbus. Like, isn't that on the Book of Mormon that says that it's Laman and Lamel's descendants? The ones that are gonna be.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:31:43 I have to read that. Yeah, that's a good point.

Gerardo Sumano 1:31:45 The ones that are gonna be conquered by the Europeans. So this theory wouldn't work with that revelation received by the angel.

John Dehlin 1:31:56 Yeah, yeah. Because if their genes would have been wiped out.

Gerardo Sumano 1:31:59 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:32:00 Who are the. Who are the conquistadors? Conquering.

Gerardo Sumano 1:32:03 Right. It's not. It's not Laman and Lamel's descendants.

John Dehlin 1:32:05 That's Right. Really good.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:32:06 That's a good point.

John Dehlin 1:32:07 Yeah. I mean, unless. Unless they mean that, you know, the one out of a hundred or the one out of a thousand. Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:32:15 And that's just it. I mean, and that's just the problem. Right. And so we just.

Gerardo Sumano 1:32:19 But then there's all these prophecies that they're gonna suffer on the hands of the Europeans because, you know, because they killed the. The Nephites and. Yep. And.

John Dehlin 1:32:29 Yeah, the incredible. The incredible shrinking Lamanite, basically.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:32:33 It's true. And so we'll go to the next one. Just some of the problems with this idea that the population bottleneck. And so we just kind of said this is an interesting argument to make because the arrival of the first Americans from Asia is a textbook example of genetic bottleneck. It is commonly accepted that a small group of people either passed through a briefly open corridor between ice sheets or followed a coastal route by boat and then spread rapidly throughout the Americas over a period of about 2,000 years. And where they continued to flourish until the arrival of the European conquerors. If the bottleneck really is such a dire problem for DNA, then the people who came 2000 years ago should be a mystery because of the mutations in the innervating 2000 years.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:33:12 Yet we're still able to easily trace their genetic lineage directly back to Siberia into that malta skeleton from 24,000 years ago, despite the founder effect, despite the bottleneck, and despite a time scale that is so much deeper than the Book of Mormon. So basically to say there are areas where you would expect to see bottleneck, but you still see that DNA trickle through because DNA markers are in the billions, and now with the technology, they can pick them out. So even if the. The overwhelming number of markers might be eventually kind of gone by, you know, evolution and mixing with other populations, you're still going to have them there and we don't find them. And so there's one more slide on population.

John Dehlin 1:33:51 Isn't it also true that mitochondrial DNA doesn't get bottlenecked?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:33:55 I don't know.

John Dehlin 1:33:56 It's. It's literally passed down. Like, I think.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:33:59 Well, I think that's passed. I think that doesn't. I think mitochondrial DNA doesn't help you as much with population genetics. So I'm guessing that doesn't get bottlenecked because of the fact that it doesn't work in that same way. But I'm. I'm not.

John Dehlin 1:34:10 I'm out of my depth.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:34:11 So, yeah, I am way out of my depth on that one. And so one.

Gerardo Sumano 1:34:14 What you're saying Is that what the Church is trying to advocate for here is, like, something so catastrophic, like. Yeah, so, like, to the point where it's almost impossible that could have happened. Yeah, that could have caused a bottleneck where, like, we can't find the DNA

John Dehlin 1:34:30 anywhere in any place ever. Especially when supposedly Lamanites dotted all the land. North, south, central, east, west.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:34:39 Yeah, that's just it. I mean, that's really just it. It's impossible for this to go. And so one more paragraph from the essay on bottlenecks. It says, in addition to the catastrophic war at the end of the Book of Mormon, the European conquest and of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries touched off just such a cataclysmic chain of events. As a result of war and the spread of disease, many Native American groups experienced devastating population losses. One molecular anthropologist observed that the conquest squeezed the entire Amerindian public Amerindian population through a genetic bottleneck. He concluded this population reduction has forever altered the genetics of the surviving groups, thus complicating any attempts at reconstruction, constructing the pre Columbian genetic structure of most New World groups.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:35:22 And you know, the thing is, this example is telling you that the only people that got squeezed out in DNA testing were the Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites and Mulekites, while leaving all of the other Native American tribes traceable. So what they're saying is we have DNA of all of these other tribes that we can. We can still find markers for. Yet the bottleneck only got the Book of Mormon. So the Book of Mormon people, under this idea, mixed in with this much larger population, and then they mixed in with this much larger population and then just got perfectly squeezed out. Just them and everyone else stayed. I mean, that's the problem. And so.

Gerardo Sumano 1:35:57 Sorry, go ahead.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:35:58 No, you can go ahead.

Gerardo Sumano 1:35:59 Well, when you think about it's not just the DNA, later you're probably gonna talk about archaeology. Like, we can't find any trace that these people existed. Yeah, and I mean, the DNA gives you the big picture because, like, but, but the fact that we can't find their writings, we can't find their buildings, we can't find the, their animals, they're just like the, the, the type of plants they were using. Nothing. We can't find anything. It's just.

John Dehlin 1:36:27 Yeah, if they knew writing, if they knew Hebrew.

Gerardo Sumano 1:36:30 Right.

John Dehlin 1:36:31 And if they knew reformed Egyptian, at least we'd have that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:36:35 That's just it. And there's. That's the problem. Like, again, we talked about it earlier like this. The DNA is being confirmed by all These other field. Fields of study. And so it's not the DNA on its own that's contradicting anything else we have. And so with the Book of Mormon, to your point, all the other fields of study are telling us the same thing, that this is not a historical book, and the DNA is confirming that. And so, again, to your point, that's. That's a great way to look at it. It's just we have nothing else to go from, and yet we're being told by the Church that DNA magically jumped over these very specific groups of the Book of Mormon while leaving everyone else still there. And that's just not. It's not even remotely plausible.

Gerardo Sumano 1:37:09 And the reason why I was thinking about that is because we can go and look at the pyramids that the Maya built, the pyramids of the Aztecs, the Nahua, and then we can confirm that those existed by DNA. We can know where they came from. Right. The Egyptians. But we can't do that with Book of Mormon people.

John Dehlin 1:37:29 Yeah. Why not?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:37:30 Yeah, it's a problem. And so, yeah, so that leads us to our last big kind of idea about the DNA from the essay, which is genetic drift, which is to say that you get a gradual loss of genetic markers in small populations just due to randomness. So, you know, if you took a jar of like, 50 marbles, 25 red, 25 blue, and then you picked out 25, you might not get an equal number of colors, and then over time, one of those colors might go away. And so the Church's essay gives you an image where they show, you know, 10 red and 10 blue, and then eventually it turns into 20 blue, just out of random events.

Genetic Drift and Other Apologetic Arguments

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:38:04 But if you go to the next slide, this is really just throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks, because just like the population bottleneck, we are now told that it could be genetic drift instead of the founder effect. So now they're taking, like, three different ways to say, how could their DNA be wiped from the record? And the marble illustration is just terrible because there's truth. If you take 10 red, 10 blue, and you keep doing a random experiment, eventually you might get rid of one of the colors.

Guest 1:38:31 And.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:38:31 But the problem is with DNA markers, there are 30 billion base pairs of the human genome. So basically, what we wrote in the annotated essay, Kellen wrote, imagine doing this experiment with a jar the size of Texas that contained 30 billion marbles. After a few centuries, yeah. You're going to see that you've made a little headway towards removing one of the colors more than the other.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:38:54 But at the same time, you're never going to get rid of all 30 billion. And that's what, you know, a lot of the. When you're a podcast with the three geneticists, they were saying, like, the idea that you could get the 30 billion pairs to just completely erase the record of DNA. I believe the example they use was throwing a pizza against the wall and having it come out the other side untouched, because it's impossible. You're talking in just a couple thousand years, the idea you could remove 30 billion marbles from a jar, it just, it doesn't happen. And so they're giving you this example without even telling you what would be required for it to work. And they're just hoping you don't think about the difference between 20 marbles and 30 billion base pairs of the human genome.

John Dehlin 1:39:35 When you talk to Simon, clearly one of his least favorite people on the planet appears to be Hugo. And it's not personal. It's not like he thinks he's a bad human. But, you know, you just get this intense bitterness that Simon feels towards Hugo. And I think it's because Simon knows that Hugo should know better.

Gerardo Sumano 1:40:00 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:40:01 Hugo knows that these are, this is an overwhelmingly deceptive argument. And, and I think just like Egyptologists like Rittner were just so offended at apologists like John Gee or Kerry Mohlstein, because they're, they're literally disrespecting, they're blaspheming. It's the science equivalent of blasphemy. I think science feels like Hugo Perego is just disgustingly distorting genetics to.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:40:33 That's just it.

John Dehlin 1:40:33 I mean, to rescue the Book of Mormon.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:40:36 Yes. And you're using your degree to your reputation. Yeah. So you're using your degree to get people to buy into your apologetics. And so you're not doing scholarship, you're doing apologetics using the degree as your appeal to authority. And that is where, you know, I always get annoyed with. To that point, it's like, you know better. And when you know better and then you still push something that you know doesn't make sense. That's when I start to say, okay, now you've gone from just being. Trying to be faith promoting to being deceptive because you're not giving the full picture to people who don't know better. And I want to, I want to

John Dehlin 1:41:07 publicly invite Hugo Perego to come on Mormon Stories, maybe with Simon, and to just respond to this episode.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:41:14 Well, yeah, I mean, I would love, because like I said, I Don't know. I think, I think his name's Hugo Perego. But either way.

John Dehlin 1:41:19 What did I say?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:41:21 Hugo. But I think it's without the H. I think it's you. But either way, I mean, you know, it's just like I said, we. I don't. Apologists typically don't want to come on because it's really hard when you're presenting something and then you get pushback because when you're mixing it with the theology of the Book of Mormon, that's when you get into trouble. I know, Hugo, Prego, from what I've heard. I think Simon even said it like, the dude's a brilliant guy, he could talk about this stuff all day. But then when you have to mix it with theology, that's when you get into trouble. And I don't think he'll ever put himself out there, but we'll see. I mean, maybe someday we'll get there, but anyways, let'. Swe. We're almost, we're almost around here for those of you who are sticking in. And so this is one last.

John Dehlin 1:41:57 No, we're doing good. We're under two hours. This is great.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:42:00 I think we'll be okay. So this is from the Church's essay. And they say a study in Iceland combining both genetic and genealogical data demonstrates that the majority of people living in that country today inherited mitochondrial mitochondrial DNA from just a small percentage of the people who lived there only 300 years ago. The mitochondrial DNA of the majority of Icelanders living at that time simply did not survive the random effects of drift. It is conceivable that much of the DNA of Book of Mormon peoples did not survive for the same reason. And again, even in this scenario, genetic drift has still not been significant enough that there is the least bit of contention where they came from or when they arrived.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:42:37 And so they're making this thing to say genetic drift is happening, but we still know where they came from, we still know where, who they are. And so again, it's not making the case. They're saying it is. I know on the episode you guys did way back when, eight years ago, whenever it was, they mentioned that Iceland has a very unique situation as far as genetics go because it's so isolated. So it's cherry picking a study that isn't comparable to the Americas anyways. But even still, we know who they are, we still know when they came from. So to make that claim that this gives the Book of Mormon plausibility, it just doesn't work because they're literally giving US an example that still shows us who they are. And in the Book of Mormon, we still can't find their DNA anywhere.

Gerardo Sumano 1:43:14 But I think their point here is, like, well, that's 300 years ago, but if they multiply 300 by 2000, then

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:43:21 that's true, and that's fair. But, like.

John Dehlin 1:43:22 But again, there's too many g. Too many base pairs in too few years.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:43:26 Right, Right. Yeah. There's just not enough time for it to happen. And that's the whole thing.

Gerardo Sumano 1:43:31 Well, and when you have the Jaredites coming, you have the. The Lehigh coming. Mulekites, like, you have so many Hebrews coming and populating America all the way to, like, 2. 2 million soldiers fighting in the wars,

John Dehlin 1:43:44 filling the land north, south, east, and west with millions of soldiers. Right, right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:43:49 That's the problem. Just gets too much.

John Dehlin 1:43:50 But, but, but we start with where we started in this episode. The Book of Mormon says, God's going to protect the land and not let anyone else come here.

Gerardo Sumano 1:43:58 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:43:59 Period.

Guest 1:44:00 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:44:00 I mean, that makes all the rest of this conversation irrelevant.

Gerardo Sumano 1:44:03 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:44:03 Right? Yep.

Guest 1:44:05 All right.

Gerardo Sumano 1:44:05 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:44:05 And that's just it. And so this is, again, a quote from Jamie, Hannah, Sandy, from the episode, because she was just so good at it. And she just talks about this essay, and she says, I feel like it's just intellectually dishonest. It says genetic profiles may be entirely lost and combinations that once existed may become so diluted that they're difficult to detect. And I just again, want to emphasize that with computers that can handle 3 billion nucleotide pairs difficult to detect is not true anymore. Our ability to detect even the smallest, the very smallest data is growing with every day that these computers are running data analysis.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:44:37 And so she's just saying, like, you can't say that these things are disappearing because they can find too much. The technology is getting better, and it's just dishonest to say that they might be lost when we know that that's just not what actually happens in reality. So you could say, well, in theory, they could be lost, but in reality, they're just. It's not happening. And so to make that claim as if that's the likely or even possible solution, I think is just bad. And to continue with Jamie, because, like I said, I just loved the way she presented this episode with you guys from the essay.

The Essay's Inconclusive Evidence Claim

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:45:10 The essay says, much as critics and defenders of the Book of Mormon would like to use DNA studies to support their views, the evidence is simply inconclusive. So they're saying both. Hey, if you're A defender of the Book of Mormon. You can't use it either, which is really convenient because DNA does not bolster their view regardless.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:45:25 But she says it's not that as our ability to test DNA data for ancestry markers increases that we're getting any kind of new picture. We are just honing in. It's almost like initially we started with a 3 megapixel camera. There were certainly maybe some darker areas in, some lighter areas. And the more we get it, we're getting a much more higher resolution photo. With passing time, there hasn't been anything that is drastically altering the photo and the narrative and the story of the origins of indigenous populations. Instead of it is honing in and redefining and making more clear the picture that we had already understood.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:45:54 And so she's just making the point we're making, which is to say we're getting more and more data every day. And every day the picture is telling us over and over again that the Book of Mormon's story and narrative is not historical. And nothing has changed that. Nothing has come out since DNA studies took over to change that. And so to kind of say that we just don't know.

Gerardo Sumano 1:46:14 Well, it's making this, this essay more and more irrelevant because the more we find, the more markers we're able to test every day, the more implant impossible this theories become.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:46:28 That's just it. I mean, and you're right. And that's, and that's the perfect way to say it's just the essay becomes more and more nonsensical with time.

Gerardo Sumano 1:46:34 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:46:35 And at some point they're either going to have to change the essay or remove it or do something because it just, it gets embarrassing at some point to continue to hold on to something that is just overwhelmingly. And again, it's not just DNA. DNA is again, confirming other things. And so wouldn't it be, I just

John Dehlin 1:46:50 have to say, wouldn't it be amazing if in one instance the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants or the Book of Abraham or prophets, seers and revelators, Kinderhook plates, kinder complaints revealed one piece of information, Just one. Just one. That the entire body of science went, whoa, now there's something that changes everything. But not one instance has that ever happened. Ever. Yeah, I think that convinced the dudes at the Maxwell Institute.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:47:26 But like, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's.

Gerardo Sumano 1:47:28 I don't think it would convince anyone else outside of the Maxwell Institute.

John Dehlin 1:47:32 Yeah, just one time, I'm just. Come on. Maxwell Institute. Fair Mormon. One time can you find me one instance where history, Revelations, Mormon scripture, taught science a thing or two in something meaningful? Anyway, Sorry.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:47:46 No, that's true. No, you're good. So, all right, so this one, it's just a conclusion from their essay, which is to say nothing is known about the DNA of Book of Mormon peoples. Even if such information were known, processes such as population bottleneck, genetic drift and post Columbian immigration from West Eurasia make it unlikely that their DNA could be detected today is. Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, speaking as a lawyer observed, it is our position that secular evidence can neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. And again, it's just like I mentioned this earlier, it's kind of like what they're doing with Heavenly Mother now, which is to say we don't want to speculate on it because what we do know doesn't help our cause.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:48:22 So just don't worry about it. And it's just, it's again, the Book of Mormon was supposed to be this record that will be proven with time. And because it's being disproven with time, then they say basically guys, we can't know either way, so just stop looking. And it's just, it's such an intellectually dishonest approach to the members that you require so much of.

John Dehlin 1:48:40 To me, that quote basically says, these are not the droids you're looking for. Yeah, that's exactly what that quote is. Who would ever expect science to validate the Book of Mormon? Of course science can't validate it, except for the fact that the Mormon Church paid archeologists and anthropologists and geneticists tons of money for decades to try and prove the Book of Mormon was true. But then once all that money that got wasted, which was tithing by the way, failed to prove the Book of Mormon true to the point of Thomas Ferguson losing his faith over going on those archeological and anthropological digs. Well then all of a sudden, of course science, of course. Now general authorities are saying, of course science could never prove or disprove the Book of Mormon.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:49:21 Yeah, that's just it. Yeah, it is. And like, so we have one last slide and it's got a small video and it's a video from a church produced video called People of Destiny. And it's where they rewrite the history of the Native Americans and the Polynesians and basically interject the Book of Mormon history into their history. And I just want to watch this. It's like a 55 second clip of this woman and her kids, because it just shows how heartbreaking it is when you take someone's identity with a history that is simply not true. And so if we could just watch

Guest 1:49:51 that really quick, we sit around the kitchen table every morning and read from its pages. As a family, we have learned about a man named Lehi, about his son Nephi and Jacob. We have grown to love these men very much and learn from the Book of Mormon that we are their descendants, that we come from them. And because we love them so much, we have named our sons after them. This is Lehi. He is a very special young man. And this is Nephi. We are grateful for these men because we have given their names to our son so that our sons can remember them.

John Dehlin 1:50:35 And I just. I just have to ask, Gerardo, you know, how does that feel for you as someone who. Who is a Native, you know, who. Who is a Latino. Yeah. Who has ancestors from. From, you know, Native American ancestors. How does that make you feel?

Gerardo Sumano 1:50:50 It feels invasive. And in Mexico, people do that a lot. They name their kids after Book of Mormon characters, Nephi, Lehi, because they really believe that they are descendants from these people. And it's sad that the Church has hijacked the real history.

John Dehlin 1:51:10 Yeah. Well, Mike, you gotta run. So do you want to give us any final. Any final thoughts?

Summary and Closing Thoughts on DNA Evidence

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:51:16 No, just. Again, I think as we go through these overviews, it's really important to take them in totality and to look at how the apologetics function within the problems. And if they don't make sense, then you have to ask yourself, what does that mean? And once you get to that point, if you're open to it, I hope you'll read more, check out our future episodes. And just. Even if you want to remain a believer, I think it's just important you understand that these problems are real. They don't go away. And a lot of the Church's apologetics just simply don't fit the evidence, even though they'll try to frame them in a way that they do. And so I hope that at least you're getting learning some new stuff out of these episodes. I hope that's the case, and I appreciate anyone who's listening and giving us feedback and all that.

John Dehlin 1:51:53 Well, Mike, you've been great. Thank you so much.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:51:56 Thank you so much.

John Dehlin 1:51:57 Thank you so much for your willingness to come on.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:51:59 Yeah, we'll see you guys all soon.

John Dehlin 1:52:01 We'll see you. We'll see you on another episode really quick.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:52:04 Yeah, definitely. Take care, guys.

John Dehlin 1:52:05 All right. And I think what I want to do is go ahead and read the final slide that Mike wasn't able to read because the final slide does a really good summary. And so what he says is, you know, the conclusions on DNA, the Book of Mormon number one, until DNA studies arrived, the Book of Mormon was clear that the Americans were populated from Jerusalem along with Joseph Smith and God via claimed revelations. I would add all prophet seers and revelators from Joseph Smith through Spencer W. Kimball, even as Jeff Benson, even Gordon B. Hinckley, there was no confusion about who the Lamanites were. It was Native American.

John Dehlin 1:52:46 So it wasn't until DNA studies arrived that that was a problem. Second, once DNA showed that Native Americans have nothing to do with the Book of Mormon times, the Church changed their introduction to the Book of Mormon to acknowledge that they got it wrong. Isn't that why we have prophet seers and revelators, to see things in advance, not to respond to science once science has disproved the predominant narrative, which Richard Bushman himself has agreed is not true. The third bullet, teaching Native Americans and Polynesians that the Book of Mormon is history, is stealing their true identities and rewriting the history of their ancestors. That's a big problem that Gerardo just spoke to.

John Dehlin 1:53:28 And then finally, point four, summary, point four. If the Book of Mormon got it wrong, Joseph Smith got it wrong, and even God got it wrong via revelation. And I would even add, then the scriptures get it wrong, the Book of Mormon got it wrong, the Doctrine and Covenants got it wrong. And then of course, you know, what does that tell us? And I'll just add, even if you were to just take the DNA issue in isolation, you know, I guess in theory, I think it's pretty fatal to the Book of Mormon. But it's not just DNA. Yeah, it's the Book of Abraham, it's the Kinderhook plates, it's polyandry and polygamy.

John Dehlin 1:54:06 It's the golden plates problem. It's the translation, it's the archeology, the linguistics. It's the folk magic and the treasure digging. It's the racism. How about the racism in the Book of Mormon? Like you just add all of these things up and it seems to be overwhelming. Gerardo, do you want to give a final thought?

Gerardo Sumano 1:54:26 Yeah, I agree. And I was thinking to me how it's not different than, you know, when colonizers came to Mexico and trying to impose the Catholic Church, try to wipe their natives history and try to impose, you know, a new religion. That's kind of what the Church is doing, imposing this new religion and telling the Native Americans and people in Mexico and Latin America that their history is not valid and that this. This is the one that they should be trusting and believing in. It's kind of sad.

John Dehlin 1:55:09 Yeah. All right. And we're only. We're only like five episodes in to what's going to be like a 50 or 60 episode series, hopefully. I mean, maybe that's too ambitious. Maybe Mike's gonna lose steam. But even if we just have these five, for me, these five are just profoundly. And this is all sorts of stuff I have not thought through clearly that I did, don't, don't, didn't. And still don't have a strong command of, like, this is really fascinating stuff. Aren't you loving this?

Gerardo Sumano 1:55:42 Yeah, it's great. And seeing all the issues, like, consecutively and like, you know, one after the other and. And then it's like Jeremy Reynolds always says, you have to look at the problems. Like, you have to look at the forest, not at just one tree.

John Dehlin 1:55:57 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:55:57 Because when you look at, like you said, the DNA in aggregate with all the other issues, it just really, really. It's fatal.

John Dehlin 1:56:05 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:56:06 All right.

John Dehlin 1:56:06 Well. And you know what? If you disagree, if you understand genetics and you want to come on with me and Gerardo or Mike or Simon Southerton and respond to this video, we would love to see it. If you want to respond to the Golden Plates episode, if you want to respond to the Book of Mormon translation episode or the folk Magic episode, and you're a historian or a scientist or just a really smart, thoughtful human. We don't want to make it sound like, you know, this is. This is just open and shut, closed case. But we would want to hear from you, someone with credibility, someone who's willing to really consider the evidence and give a plausible explanation for why we're seeing it wrong. Because if we're seeing it wrong, wouldn't. Wouldn't you want to know, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 1:56:59 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:57:00 Yeah. If the Book of Mormon really is your history, the history of your ancestors, wouldn't you want to know?

Gerardo Sumano 1:57:06 Yeah, I. I see it really hard when Terrell Givens is telling us that there's so much of Joseph Smith in it that, you know, like in the Book of Mormon, like apologists today are admitting that.

John Dehlin 1:57:19 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:57:19 There's so much of 19th century stuff in it that gives little room for it to actually be an actual factual history of Native Americans.

John Dehlin 1:57:30 Yeah. But I mean, but we're open in theory. I mean, really, if you've got something really good, please let Us know. Us know.

Gerardo Sumano 1:57:37 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:57:37 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:57:38 All right.

John Dehlin 1:57:38 Well, Gerardo, I'm really grateful you could join us. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's great to have you and all our viewers and listeners. Please check out LDS discussions.com for the 60/inside that Mike has done. Plus he does an entire review of the book Saints and talks about and the gospel topics essays. It's such an amazing website. Check out ldsdiscussions.com Check out our past episodes. Know that we're going to be doing many, many more of these episodes. Look for about one a week. We may have a bit of a pause over the summer. We'll see. But if you value this content, if you want to see it continue, then we really hope you will donate to pay for Gerardo's time, to pay for Jen's time, Jennifer's time, Brooklyn's time, my time, these resources.

John Dehlin 1:58:25 We really need your support. So become a monthly donor if you support these series. Click on MormonStories.org click on the donate button. 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month. Whatever you can afford. We're transparent in our finances.

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John Dehlin 1:59:29 That's what we're all about. We're not about destroying Mormonism. We're not about destroying the Mormon Church. We're not even about taking people's faith away or convincing them to leave the church. If, if you know all this stuff and you still remain in the church, double thumbs up. More power to you. We support people remaining Mormon.

John Dehlin 1:59:48 We just want everyone to know the truth and then to make their decisions from there. So thanks very much for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Please email us with feedback. Mormonstoriesmail.com Please follow us on all the social medias and we'll see you all again very soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Thanks everybody. Take care.

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